Horror Victorianorum

December 2, 2015 6:41 PM

"Such was the heady moment when the taboo against Victorian art was lifted. It shows that a taboo is not necessarily a bad thing. By holding the entire Victorian era in brackets, as it were, and then revisiting it after a long interval, it became possible to see it with fresh eyes, to discover it as a vast and dazzlingly new continent." Michael J. Lewis, The new “Horror Victorianorum.”
posted by mittens (12 comments total)

Sidewise, my parents (WWII babies) remember the rehabilitation of Victorian buildings as *mostly* because those were the cheap unfashionable buildings beatniks could afford; and a little because the shine had come off modernity and Modernism, with MADestruction and environmental damage.
posted by clew at 10:41 PM on December 2, 2015

Huh, the term is from David Stove. He was hilarious.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:31 PM on December 2, 2015

I'd been looking up Fortuny, via Gurney's blog, when I found this 19th century realism site. Some good painters back then.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:30 AM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

> David Stove

Oh god. I somehow missed the reference to him when I read the article the first time.

Man. I cannot stand that guy. He was a totally unapologetic sexist and racist (not to mention his sophomoric misreading of Popper.)

godddd don't get me started on david stove
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 7:19 AM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

like i'm pretty sure stove thought "falsifiable" meant the same as "false"
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 7:20 AM on December 3, 2015

Interesting, but very particular to America, which is confusing as the author references, for instance, the Crystal Palace and Lytton Strachey, both incredibly English things, as part of his argument. Britain kept its Victorian infrastructure and a lot of it has never been less than iconic: the Natural History Museum, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, innumerable marvellous Victorian Railway Stations, Victorian public toilets, Victorian Parks etc. And of course the whole Westminster complex, Houses of Parliament and Big Ben etc. You don't get more iconic than most of tourist London.

So I'm wondering about the cultural difference here. British urban centres were heavily bombed during WWII which necessitated wholesale demolition and reconstruction, but this happened too recently to be part of the phenomenon described. America of course has lots of space, whereas building in Britain is always done on centuries worth of ruins. In Britain Victorian building was much sturdier, more spacious and more comfortable - luxury being suddenly much more generally available - than what had gone before; in a battle between refinement (Georgian and Regency architecture) and comfort, comfort remains popular and more generally accessible. In fact the casual disrespect towards old buildings was directed more towards the really old stuff (note that conservation only became an issue in Old Market in the 70's), Mediaeval and Elizabethan, because apart from prestige buildings like Cathedrals, they were damned uncomfortable.

Yeah, in Britain I don't think the Victorians' reputation as enormously dynamic reformers, improvers and popularists did suffer that much in spite of picking up a whiff of the hypocrite along the way. A different attitude to innovation in the two countries, perhaps? Except that what the Victorians built was extremely innovative in its day. So maybe it's more about the lack of space in Britain compared to America, and all the extra weight of tradition, bearing in mind the remnants of all that history make the Victorian stuff that superceded it look pretty good still. Oh and since Horror Victorianorum was coined by an Australian, no doubt an anti-colonial sensibility also fed into the desire to leave all Victorian things behind.

I'll end with one of my favorite Victorian photographs, Isembard Kingdom Brunel looking well at home in the machine age. Brave, confident and clever, and an absolute visionary. A world-changer.

misc: elected 2nd in a list of 100 great Britons in a BBC poll, Brunel was half French.
He was about 5' tall.
SS Great Britain, rescued and berthed in Bristol.

posted by glasseyes at 7:35 AM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh god. I somehow missed the reference to him when I read the article the first time.

The positive reference to Stove makes a lot more sense when you consider that the essay was published by the New Criterion.
posted by kenko at 9:33 AM on December 3, 2015

One of the reasons Andrew LLyod Weber owns like, the bulk of major Pre-Raphaelite works is that when he bought them in the mid 60s it was at the complete nadir of popularity and could be bought for almost nothing.
posted by The Whelk at 12:22 PM on December 3, 2015

> The positive reference to Stove makes a lot more sense when you consider that the essay was published by the New Criterion.

Yeah. I enjoyed the article but I have to wonder whether it's exaggerated somewhat, given the source. The narrative of a total villification followed by a latter-day redemption of Victorian aesthetics fits nicely with that publication's, uh, Horror Modernorum.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 4:50 PM on December 3, 2015

Has anything else been written about the trajectory of 20th century critical thought on Victorian architecture?
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 4:52 PM on December 3, 2015

glasseyes, weren't UK city centers rebuilt in 60s modernism? Coventry, I think, infamously so? The US may have had more popular repudiation of the Victorian, but official opinion seems to have been anti.

And The Whelk's example suggests that pop enthusiasm wasn't all that wide.
posted by clew at 11:09 PM on December 5, 2015

Has anything else been written about the trajectory of 20th century critical thought on Victorian architecture?

I'd start with a google scholar search on ornament and crime victorian architecture, entries after 1950.

This would dredge up works referring to the 1910's essay Ornament and Crime, basically claiming 'tattoos = cannibals, therefore ornament = moral rot'.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:22 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]