Exploiting the Victorians
We are delighted to see that a Real Victorian Historian has been invited to undertake the unsavoury task of reviewing The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg, and that she wields a mighty codfish upon him: In parliament, Rees-Mogg is often referred to as “the honourable member for the 18th century”, a nod to those funny clothes he wears, along with pretending not to know the name of any modern pop songs. What a shame, then, that he has not absorbed any of the intellectual and creative elegance that flourished during that period. The Augustan age was a time of scalpel-sharp prose, cutting wit and stylish fancy. Yet far from emulating Swift or Voltaire, Rees-Mogg gives us the “slipshod style” and “tedious panegyric” that Lytton Strachey famously identified as the key characteristic of Victorian biographical writing.
Golden codfish award of the week, maybe the month, possibly even the year, to Kathryn Hughes, stat.
Alas, they have clearly not employed anyone who actually no enything about the subject to review Outrages by Naomi Wolf, because of course eny fule can review a scattershot diatribe covering matters which are hardly news to anybody who has given the slightest attention to the flourishing field of history of sexuality over the past several decades, while not noticing, indeed reiterating, Massive Error about the Contagious Diseases Acts: “allowed the state to seize any woman and make her submit to a forced vaginal exam. If a doctor thought she was infected, she would be imprisoned.” The act “allowed any undercover policeman to arrest any woman in Britain if she looked too sexually experienced, acted too flirtatiously, seemed too flashily dressed, was too drunk, was out late - or was simply having too much fun in male company”.
No. Designated port and garrison towns, though I will concede, routine policing of lower-class women generally was harsh.
There are some very dodgy assertions in there generally. Symonds' memoirs were published in an edition by his biographer Phyllis Grosskurth in 1984, not 2016. We wonder if Virago Press (O how are the mighty fallen: this is the press that published pioneering work by Walkowitz and others on late Victorian sexual attitudes, prostitution etc, after all) sent the work to any suitable external referees before publishing... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2924293.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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