Journal of Victorian Culture

ISSN: 1355-5502 (Print) 1750-0133 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvc20

How Civilized Were the Victorians?

Peter K. Andersson
To cite this article: Peter K. Andersson (2015) How Civilized Were the Victorians?, Journal of
Victorian Culture, 20:4, 439-452, DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2015.1090673
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1090673

Published online: 12 Oct 2015.

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Journal of Victorian Culture, 2015

Vol. 20, No. 4, 439452, http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1090673

How Civilized Were the Victorians?

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Peter K. Andersson
When we speak generally of the Victorian period these days, it is often with a view to
problematize its supposed prudishness and repression. Were they really as well mannered and restrained as the clich would have it? It has become fashionable to assume
a sceptical attitude towards this notion, and yet it lingers, in films and television documentaries, or in the neo-Victorian fiction of recent years. But there is a larger problem
behind this debate that I would like to illuminate. The established picture of the Victorian
period lingers, I would argue, not only in popular media, but also in academic research.
Although ambitions towards innovative views on the Victorians are growing, an unresolved relationship among Victorian scholars with the ideas of civility and repression,
and a continued dominance of literary sources and methods, obstructs the possibility
of going beyond the notion of the Victorian period as an age of civilization.
The theory of the civilizing process as outlined by Norbert Elias has been heavily
criticized since it was first presented in the 1930s, but as a foundation stone in the modern conception of the history of mentalities from the late Middle Ages until today, it
continues to play a vital role. It has also been expanded by scholars with an ambition to
find out what happened to the process in the modern period. Notably, Dutch sociologist
Cas Wouterss research suggests an informalization of manners and an emancipation of
emotions during the twentieth century.1 But the old impression of a repressed Victorian
age has also been reinvigorated by the enormous influence on cultural history of Michel
Foucaults ideas of disciplining discourses. Although Foucault was critical of what he
called the repressive hypothesis, his proposition that Victorian culture was formed
through the establishment of discourses, while tracing the origins of discipline to factors
other than those suggested by Elias, has reinforced scholars preference for identifying
such discourses in Victorian Studies in recent decades.2
The period that is most frequently stereotyped in the history of manners or behaviour
is the Victorian. Since the early twentieth century and in countries other than Britain
the nineteenth century in general is still characterized according to the preconceived
1. Cas Wouters, Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (London: Sage, 2007). Other
examples include: Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1992); Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lfgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of
Middle-Class Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and Peter N. Stearns,
American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: NYU Press,
1994).
2. On the similarities between Elias and Foucault, see Dennis Smith, The Civilizing Process
and The History of Sexuality: Comparing Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, Theory and
Society, 28.1 (1999), 79100; Holly Furneaux, Victorian Sexualities, Literature Compass,
8.10 (2011), 76775.
2015 Leeds Trinity University

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notions connected to the term Victorian.3 Wouters contends in his work that the nineteenth century saw the creation of an elaborate and increasingly formalized regime
of manners that comprised a complicated system of introductions, invitations, calls,
leaving calling cards, at homes, receptions, dinners, and so on.4 This image of the
nineteenth century as the age of courtesy and good manners is not inaccurate, but it is
inadequate, and leaves out large sections of the social hierarchy as well as most practices
of everyday life in order to paint a picture of visitations and hat-tippings. It would be
easy to call our own period a time of texting codes and make it seem like a very strict
and ritualized age, but no one living in this period would believe such an image because
they know it leaves out all manner of things, from the situational context to the complex
relation between class distinctions and trend-setting groups.
There are competing paradigms of Victorian research in which some scholars are
inclined to maintain the image of the period as a time when discourses of self-restraint
became hegemonic, whereas others prefer to point to aspects that resisted or ignored this
discourse, thus making the discourse appear more negligible.5 I believe this competition
will continue in some form or another for a long time, since the opposition is to some
extent a political one and also, perhaps, a philosophical one, depending on whether
one promotes a model of history as a series of interlocking processes or as a series of
heterogeneous twists and turns. But in spite of new approaches with the potential to
give us a more varied picture of the Victorian age, research on the backstage of that age
seems to have problems establishing itself within the field of Victorian Studies. Take, for
example, the field of Victorian police history. It was formerly common among historians
to assume that the establishment of modern police forces in the nineteenth century was
a step forwards in the implementation of civilizing mechanisms and the imposition of
middle-class values into the lives of the lower strata.6 In recent decades, this simplistic

3. The negative depiction of the Victorian period was promoted especially by the Bloomsbury
Group. See, for instance, Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus,
1918). On this phenomenon, see Simon Joyce, On or about 1901: The Bloomsbury Group
Looks Back at the Victorians, Victorian Studies, 46.4 (2004), 63154.
4. Cas Wouters, How Civilizing Processes Continued: Towards an Informalization of Manners
and a Third Nature Personality, Sociological Review, 59.1 (2011), 14059.
5. The former perspective is most often an implicit foundation in works that deal with Victorian
bourgeois novels. See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Martin A. Danahay, Gender at
Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); and Gail
Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, 18801917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The latter stance is mainly
represented by Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); Matthew
Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001); Peter Gay, The Bourgeois
Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19841998).
6. See Robert Storch, The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular
Culture in Northern England, 18501880, Journal of Social History, 9.4 (1976), 481509; Phil
Cohen, Policing the Working-Class City, in Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy
Theory to Marxism, ed. by Bob Fine and others (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 11836.

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characterization has been challenged by numerous police historians pointing to the

working-class background and character of the men who made up police forces, and
the general commonality that existed between police constables and slum dwellers.7
In spite of numerous empirical examples undermining the previous notion, however,
the teleological conception of modern policing persists in research to show, not least, a
divide between historians inclined to root out the general character of a historical age
and those who prefer to let close-up micro studies demonstrate the heterogeneous and
contradictory character of a period.8
The dominance of cultural history and the resulting preference for literary and published texts as source material has led to an inclination towards literate perspectives in
Victorian scholarship, making it difficult for studies of living conditions and everyday
life to break through. An illustrative example is the study of lower-class women in the
Victorian period. Although not subject to an explicit scholarly conflict, the field can be
divided into historians who study the living conditions and subcultures and historians
who study representations of these women. Representatives of the former group are
still extremely difficult to find. In the 1970s, when history from below and oral history were in fashion, scholars continued to focus on the social and political structures
conditioning the lives of the poor. Only in the 1980s and 90s did the work of people
like Ellen Ross, Francoise Barret-Ducrocq, and Melanie Tebbutt shed fuller light on the
everyday practices that shaped womens experiences in this period.9 Few historians have

7. Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the Eighteenth Century
to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009); Joanne Klein, Invisible Men: The Secret Lives of Police
Constables in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham 19001939 (Liverpool: University of
Liverpool Press, 2010). The civilizing process has also been referenced in surveys of modern
crime rates, resulting in an ongoing debate in which some scholars view a decrease in crime
in the nineteenth century as a substantiation of the civilizing process. This is a potentially
immense area of study, and when numbers are juxtaposed with changes in, say, the nature
of crimes or the level of cruelty in relation to the norm of the period, the question becomes
more difficult to answer. See Pieter C. Spierenburg, Violence and the Civilizing Process: Does
it Work?, Crime, Histoire & Socits/Crime, History & Societies, 5.2 (2001), 87105; J. Carter
Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement
(London: Routledge, 2004).
8. Although new perspectives have been adopted by police historians, works that refer to
Victorian policing in passing tend to reproduce older notions. See especially Patrick Joyce,
The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 10911, and
Francis Dodsworth, Mobility and Civility: Police and the Formation of the Modern City, in
The New Blackwell Companion to the City, ed. by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2011), pp. 23544.
9. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 18701918 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993); Francoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality
and Desire among Working-Class Men and Women in Nineteenth-Century London (New
York: Penguin Books, 1992); Melanie Tebbutt, Womens Talk? A Social History of Gossip in
Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 18801960 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). See also Elizabeth
Roberts, A Womans Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 18901940 (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 1995); Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture
in Salford and Manchester, 19001939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992).

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picked up where they left off, in spite of a recent revitalization of history from below.10
That revival is still fragmented, however, flourishing online and in public engagement
rather more than within the Academy. When one looks at more specific subjects such
as the Victorian prostitute, for example, it becomes apparent how well researched the
discursive history is compared to the nonverbal or everyday perspectives. Timothy
Gilfoyles extensive survey of the historiography of prostitution at the end of the 1990s
stated that historians increasingly focus on the daily lives of prostitutes but the few
books he cited examined the regulation and disciplining of prostitutes rather than prostitutes own viewpoints.11 Since Gilfoyles review, the lives of prostitutes have continued
to be neglected in favour of studies on the regulation of prostitution or representations
of prostitutes in fiction and journalism.12 Plebeian women were seldom given a voice
in Victorian society; sadly, the same goes for Victorian Studies.
It might be wise to leave it at that and conclude that the division between different
types of historians is unbridgeable, but there are instances in which it hampers the
progress of historical research. The effortlessness with which scholars allow the literary
version of Victorian culture to define our image of the period leads to a situation in
which received notions such as the civilizing thesis are insufficiently questioned, and
when a work of scholarship acquires a certain status, succeeding researchers take its
claims at face value. A famous example is the now-dismissed notion that Victorians were
so embarrassed by naked table legs that they put skirts on them. Although the idea has
long been discarded, it crops up in respectable works like Richard Sennetts The Fall of
Public Man (1992), a book that provided historians with numerous other unfounded
misapprehensions about the nineteenth century.13 Another example is the assumption
that early photographic portraits of lower-class people are characterized by a rigid
frontality in which the sitters, uncomfortably posed, stare seriously into the camera,
an assertion originally made by John Tagg in The Burden of Representation (1988). It
10. See, for example, the ManyHeadedMonsters blog, <http://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.
com/voices-of-the-people> [accessed 25 August 2015]; Tim Hitchcock, A New History
from Below, History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), 29498; Helen Rogers, The Revival of
History from Below in Victorian Studies, BAVS Talks 2015, <https://youtu.be/rToJag5WgWI>
[accessed 24 August 2015].
11. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of
Modernity, American Historical Review, 104.1 (1999), 11741.
12. Recent work on Victorian prostitution includes Nina Attwood, The Prostitutes Body: Rewriting
Prostitution in Victorian Britain (London and Brookfield: Pickering and Chatto, 2011); Greta
Wendelin, The Prostitutes Voice in the Public Eye: Police Tactics of Security and Discipline
within Victorian Journalism, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7.1 (2010), 5369;
Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian
Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
13. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 167. The notion was skilfully demolished by Matthew
Sweet in his insightful book Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.
xiixv. Sennett bases much of his reasoning on half-truths twisted to suit his own arguments,
especially when it comes to seeing the bourgeois culture that he glimpses in Victorian novels
as representative of broad social processes. And yet, according to Google Scholar, the book
has been quoted by over 5000 scholarly works, at least a thousand of which have been published in the last six years.

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has since been reproduced uncritically in numerous works on early photography when
the oppressive aspects of photography and its civilizing gaze need to be corroborated.14
In fact, Tagg based his statement on a single cartoon from a French periodical.15 Only
certain types of portraits posed lower-class sitters this way; there are abundant variations
in the masses of unresearched photographs of impecunious or rural people.
While most myths about the Victorians are sufficiently well known to have been
completely dismissed, certain phenomena of the period are devoted so much research
that they have come to be viewed as characteristic of the age, despite being far from
representative. One example is the references to the stereotype of the flneur in works on
the history of the nineteenth-century city. It is difficult to trace from whence the habit
of using this character as symptomatic of nineteenth-century city life came perhaps
Marshall Berman but the fact is that this is merely a literary trope, highly relevant to
students of symbolist poetry or realist novels, but which has also entered into the works
of social or cultural historians, some of whom engage with the idea from a critical point
of view, but many of whom fail to acknowledge that the flneur is hardly representative
of the experience of the emerging modern city.16 While it may not be erroneous to refer
to phenomena like these when making claims about some aspects of the Victorian
period, the hegemony of such perspectives and the routine allusion to them in works
that purport to paint a more general picture of the age is problematic. Although scholarly syntheses are now beginning to incorporate aspects of leisure and everyday culture
more fully than the obligatory chapters on popular culture or the domestic sphere
that were admitted on sufferance in earlier anthologies, it is still common practice to
begin texts on these aspects with literary quotations. Elaine Freedgoods recent essay
on commodity culture in the collection The Victorian World (2012) begins with a quotation from Christina Rossetti.17 Daniel M. Vyletas survey of nineteenth-century crime

14. See especially Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision and the Production of Modern Bodies
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 66; George Dimock, Children of the Mills: Re-reading Lewis
Hines Child-Labour Photographs, Oxford Art Journal, 16.2 (1993), 3754; Susan M. Ryan,
Rough Ways and Rough Work: Jacob Riis, Social Reform and the Rhetoric of Benevolent
Violence, ATQ: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 11 (1997), 191212; Visa
Immonen, Photographic Bodies and Biographical Narratives: The Finnish State Archaeologist
Juhani Rinne in Pictures, Photography and Culture, 5.1 (2012), 3751.
15. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 36.
16. Works of history that use the flneur archetype include: Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful
Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992);
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of
Light and Vision in Britain, 18001910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Peter
Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Criticisms
of the flneur as analytical tool have come mainly from gender historians. See Janet Wolff, The
Invisible Flneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, Theory, Culture & Society, 2.3
(1985), 3746, and Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 6768.
17. Elaine Freedgood, Cultures of Commodities, Cultures of Things, in The Victorian World, ed.
by Martin Hewitt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 22540.

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culture in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe (2006) begins with references to

Dostoevsky and Henry Mayhew.18
The purpose of this article is to point to aspects of Victorian culture that call for a
more definitive break with older notions of the period. These aspects emerge when
the focus of the historian is shifted away from reliance on literary sources and the
domestic culture of the middle classes. The persistence of civilizing perspectives is
symptomatic neither of a fault or a lack in scholarship, but of a skewed perspective,
stemming from an under-exploration of unconventional sources that resist adaptation
to the established theoretical tools.19 Instead of developing independent approaches to
historical sources, scholars rely on the current fashionable theoretical perspectives to
provide the driving force of ingenuity, allowing them to approach well-known sources
from unexplored angles. But the insistence on consulting a certain canon of authors
and theorists allows for limited innovation. The recently assembled V21 group claim
to be pioneering a new approach to Victorian Studies, but a look at the participant
scholars and their theoretical perspectives show that poststructuralist concepts that
have been around for 30 years still dominate. Victorian studies in the twenty-first
century continues to be about literary criticism with a focus on the usual suspects:
Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Hardy, Eliot, and Bront.20 A large number of Victorian
novelists, including those that were exceedingly popular in their day, like George du
Maurier and Margaret Oliphant, and more specialized authors, including Jerome
K. Jerome and Carlton Dawe, not to mention all the non-British writers that influenced the period, are given comparatively little attention among English-speaking
Victorianists.
Apart from the canon of Victorian novelists, certain Victorian eye-witnesses recur
in cultural histories with disproportionate frequency, including Arthur J. Munby and
his complicated relationship to working women, and Lewis Carroll and his complicated
relationship to young girls.21 Such studies have been influential in opening up new arenas

18. Daniel M. Vyleta, The Cultural History of Crime, in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century

Europe 17891914, ed. by Stefan Berger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
19. An exception to this is the recent turn to material culture. See, for instance, Alastair Owens
and others, Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday
Life in Victorian London, Journal of Victorian Culture, 15.2 (2010), 21225, and Vicky Crewe
and D. M. Hadley, Uncle Tom was there, in Crockery: Material Culture and a Victorian
Working-Class Childhood, Childhood in the Past, 6.2 (2013), 89105.
20. V21 Victorian Studies for the Twenty-First Century, <http://v21collective.org> [accessed
24 August 2015].
21. For Munby, see especially Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily
Deformation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), and Rick Allen, Munby
Reappraised: The Diary of an English Flaneur, Journal of Victorian Culture, 5.2 (2000),
26086. Recent studies of Lewis Carroll include Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll: The
Man and his Circle (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015); Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story
of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015); Jan Susina, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Childrens Literature (New
York: Routledge, 2010); Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).

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for research through the introduction of gender theory and discourse analysis, both
of which have played a vital role in the formation of cultural history in broad terms.
Nevertheless, a discursive focus on gender or class as opposed to women and workers allows scholars to overtly address issues of oppression and inequality while keeping
to accessible literary sources instead of considering the perspectives of marginalized
groups or unaffected situations.22
This skewed perspective does not automatically mean a preference for civilizing or disciplining perspectives, but sources that were produced for the purpose of
being read or seen by others (books, reports, newspaper articles, portrait photographs, and so on) were generally presented in a form or language fit for the public
eye. Examinations of sources that represent a literary or bourgeois outlook on the
working class or on deviance often revert to old notions of oppression in the guise
of discourse analysis. The hegemony of Foucauldian discourse analysis in cultural
histories of attitudes to the lower classes means that whenever a cultural historian
considers the non-elite or the lower spheres, the sources used prohibit the possibility of reaching the underdog perspective. Popular perspectives could be gauged if
unconventional sources were more widely considered. However, my point is not that
the lower classes are neglected in Victorian research.23 The problem is rather scholars
inability to look beyond discourse and the tendency to view Victorian Studies as an
exclusively literary discipline, while research on everyday life and non-elites tends to
be pigeonholed in the disciplines of labour history or social history, thus cultivating
a scholarly division.
My own research interests revolve around Victorian visual culture and physicality,
and therefore most of my examples derive from that discipline. The study of photography
or body language could stimulate a move away from representational sources and cultures of restraint and discipline, but instead it reinforces the belief that this perspective
dominated the Victorian era. In the six-volume Cultural History of the Human Body
(2010), Pamela K. Gilbert surveys popular beliefs surrounding the body in the nineteenth century. Her focus, however, remains firmly on the top-down perspective, looking
at visions of the poor and discourses of Englishness and athleticism in order to show
how bodies and bodily functions in the Victorian period were controlled, disciplined,

22. Earlier generations of womens historians have criticized the development of womens history
into gender history and the resulting shift of focus from the living conditions of neglected
groups to representations produced by social or cultural elites. See Joan Hoff, Gender as a
Postmodern Category of Paralysis, Womens History Review, 3.2 (1994), 14968; Sue Morgan,
Theorising Feminist History: A Thirty-Year Perspective, Womens History Review, 18.3 (2009),
381407; Linda Gordon, Gerda Lerner: Leftist and Feminist, Journal of Womens History,
26.1 (2014), 316.
23. See, for example, Martin Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 18601920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Ying S. Lee, Masculinity and the English
Working Class: Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2007); Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class 18651914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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and contained.24 A recent debate among sports historians concerning the origins of
English football focused on whether or not the development should be considered a
part of the civilizing process or not.25 Hence, the authors began from the assumption
that the nineteenth century was a period of discipline and then sought to confirm or
contradict that contention, while other aspects of the period, less connected to the
phenomena of discipline and civilization, were left unexplored. The monographs on
Victorian domesticity, fashion, novels, and courtesy thus eclipse the books we could
have had on street fighting, barn dancing, or woodcarving.
My own research has addressed a shift in focus and methodology: first, in my book
on Victorian streetlife, which draws attention to rules and codes of conduct in everyday
practice; and currently, in research on nineteenth-century body language.26 The points
that follow are connected to the latter project, and constitute some preliminary observations that can be distilled from a study of Victorian nonverbal culture. By nonverbal
culture I mean the practices of a historical period that lie outside the discourses reproduced in periodicals, novels, autobiographies, or government documents. In some cases,
these topics can be found by a careful reading of just such sources, as when a picture of
the street behaviour of prostitutes may be gained from the descriptions of a travelogue,
provided that the interpretations and values introduced into the description by the
author are separated from the eye-witnessing of streetwalkers. Another way of studying
nonverbal culture, however, is through material and pictorial sources that illuminate
everyday life, life cycles, popular culture, interaction orders, modes of self-presentation,
body practices, and so on. Such sources present a multifaceted and complex picture of
the Victorian period that challenges the neat paradigm of the civilizing process.
For example, late nineteenth-century vernacular portrait photography is the work
of portrait photographers who developed styles distanced from the conventions that
evolved in cities and among the more illustrious photographers. This includes village and
itinerant photographers and the small amount of remaining photographs that were taken
in the earliest photobooths. These images show how, in the collaborative process between
photographer and sitter that resulted in the documented pose, people from rural or
impecunious cultural spheres thought differently about their bodies and appearances
24. Pamela K. Gilbert, Popular Beliefs and the Body: A Nation of Good Animals, in A Cultural
History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire, ed. by Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice
(Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 12548. This perspective is found in numerous recent works on the
Victorian body. See Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. by Donald E.
Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity:
Manhood and Sports in Protestant America 18801920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001); and Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the
Lives of American Women, 18001870 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998).
25. See especially Peter Swain, The Origins of Football Debate: The Grander Design and the
Involvement of the Lower Classes, 18181840, Sport in History, 34.1 (2014), 51943; and
Peter Swain, The Origins of Football Debate: The Evidence Mounts, 18411851, International
Journal of the History of Sport, 32.2 (2015), 299317.
26. Peter K. Andersson, Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). My current research project is entitled Pose and
Posture in Ritual and Everyday Body Language, c. 18701920 and is funded by The Swedish
Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

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than the conformist men and women seen in mass-produced carte de visite photographs
of the same period. For instance, portraits of young men illustrate the prevalence of
unbridled aggressive masculinity in self-presentation, suggestive of urban street gangs
or, in the rural areas of Scandinavia and Central Europe, rowdy male group dynamics
that played a vital role in regional customs of courtship. Group photographs of young
men in particular bring such contexts to the fore (see Figure 1).27
But the presence of an expansive or unrestrained body language is not restricted to
members of the lower classes. The issue of civility and restraint was also situational. In
the earliest photo albums, for instance, we find numerous illustrations of Victorians
at play, as it were, acting under a different code of conduct than when they were at a
ball or promenading in the park. In several photo albums one may find documentations of cycling excursions or picnics in which women especially are seen in a different
light than when viewed in studio portraits or through the strict routine of household
accounts. Accounts of the leisure cultures of late nineteenth-century Sweden are never
complete without inclusion of one of the many photographs that were taken of bathers
in the extremely popular resort of Mlle in southern Sweden. In these images, men and
women from all classes are seen posing confidently in bathing suits made transparent
by the water, but there is not a trace of the self-consciousness that we might anticipate
from published guides on decorum.28
Other aspects of nineteenth-century life contain seeds to understanding its liberating
impulses. Swedish historian Eva Helen Ulvross pioneering study of dance among the
bourgeois cultures of small-town Sweden points to dancings importance in providing
moments of physical release.29 The emerging study of the presentation of photographs
through collages in photo albums has also revealed a new subversive aspect to the
lives of Victorian women.30 Photographic material like this illuminates that section of

27. See Jenny Birchall, The Carnival Revels of Manchesters Vagabonds: Young Working-Class
Women and Monkey Parades in the 1870s, Womens History Review, 15.2 (2006), 22952;
Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britains First Youth Cult
(Preston: Milo Books, 2008); Nils-Arvid Bringus, Julstugor och sommarlag: Om ungdomens
njesliv i Skne i gngen tid (Stockholm: Carlssons bokfrlag, 2005); Mats Hellspong and
Orvar Lfgren, Land och stad: Svenska samhllstyper och livsformer frn medeltid till nutid
(Lund: Gleerups, 1979), pp. 31923; Bengt af Klintberg, Kuttrasju: Folkloristiska och kulturhistoriska esser (Stockholm Norstedts, 1998), pp. 14162.
28. Several of the photographs are reproduced in Kongl. hoffotograf Peter P. Lundh. Det bsta
ljus och nutidens bsta instrumenter, ed. by Caroline Ranby (Hgans: Hgans bokhandel
och frlag, 2013).
29. Eva Helen Ulvros, Dansens och tidens virvlar. Om dans och lek i Sveriges historia (Lund:
Historiska media, 2004).
30. Talia Schaffer, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, Victorian Literature
and Culture, 39.1 (2011), 28491. A comparative piece of research is Jane Hamletts study
of female college chambers as an illustration of independence and individuality through
interior decoration: Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned: Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and
the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain, Womens History
Review, 15.1 (2006), 13761.

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Figure 1. Tintype photograph of three young men, c. 1900. Photographer unknown. Authors
collection.

Victorian society commonly labelled the lower middle class, or white-collar workers,
a heterogeneous group that has increasingly been seen as enjoying a culture of its own
rather than one of emulation and upward mobility.31 There are even indications in the
31. Peter Bailey, White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited, Journal of British
Studies, 38.3 (1999), 27390; A. James Hammerton, Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage
and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 18701920, Journal of British Studies,
38.3 (1999), 291321.

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Figure 2a and 2b. Female body language in Stockholm, early 1900s. Photographer: Erik Tryggelin.
With kind permission of Stockholm City Museum.

work of some historians that there was a prosperous subculture among young girls
of the Victorian era which encouraged initiative, forthrightness, and agency, visible
in retrospect mainly in the mid-nineteenth-century critique of the girl of the period
and the late nineteenth-century response to the shop girl.32 Sadly, this work has yet to
produce substantial insight into such subcultures; instead, criticism from a disciplining
perspective has prevailed.33
The evidence of photography demonstrates the presence of alternative body practices among young women in the nineteenth century, especially when we look at street
photography and snapshot imagery. The street photographs of Stockholm photographer Erik Tryggelin, for instance, showing women caught unawares on camera, suggest
that women had an expressive and assertive way of carrying themselves in public (see
Figures 2a and b). This includes women higher up the social scale, as corroborated by the
photographs of Linley Sambourne, showing young women in the streets of Edwardian
Kensington.34 That an expressive body language was common among working-class
32. Kristine Moruzi, Fast and Fashionable: The Girls in The Girls of the Period Miscellany,
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 14.1 (2009), 928.
33. See Lise Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl,
18801920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Katherine Mullin, The Shop-Girl
Revolutionary in Henry Jamess Princess Casamassima, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 63.2
(2008), 197222.
34. See the photographs on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies blog,
<http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com> [accessed 27 August 2015].

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women might be less of a revelation, yet what this indicates in terms of self-conceptions
and occupational subcultures remains relatively unexplored. There is, for instance, ample
material from England and other countries to warrant a study of the behaviour of female
stall keepers at street markets in the late nineteenth century.
Looking beyond photography, it is possible to gain vital insights into Victorian cultural practices through material such as court proceedings and popular culture. My own
work drawing on the Old Bailey transcripts highlights the rowdy and chaotic modes of
interaction among people who made frequent use of the public street in the Victorian
city.35 Karl Bells study on Spring-Heeled Jack looks at traces of urban folklore that interacted with elite discourses to create a hybrid culture, concluding that such processes
suggest a need for hesitancy when asserting claims about shifting relationships between
dominant and subordinate cultural expressions in the nineteenth century.36 Rosalind
Crone suggests that popular literature such as serials and penny dreadfuls contributed
to the creation of local urban identities characterized by a dialogue with the pre-modern
past, and that they constituted carnivalesque safety valves. Crone even claims that some
things in the Victorian era were becoming much less civilized.37
What these approaches indicate is that there are large parts of backstage Victorian
culture that remain insufficiently explored, and that there were discourses other than
those of civility and discipline that permeated large sections of Victorian society. The
term Victorian has become intimately linked with restrained middle-class culture, and
one might argue that Victorian culture is an extension of this, continuing to exclude
or devalue lower-class vernacular culture. The study of alternative nineteenth-century
cultures shows that what is commonly viewed as Victorian was broader and had more
continuity with earlier cultures than was once assumed.38 Alternatives to the civilized
discourse are commonly talked about in terms of Mikhail Bakhtins carnival theory,
implying some continuity from the late-medieval culture of carnival and topsy-turvy
revelry to the late Victorian culture of blood sports, music halls, and nonsense poetry.39
This is an interesting and thought-provoking thesis, but the fact that most scholars
continue to draw on Bakhtins classic terminology is an indication that this research
still needs considerable development and the cultivation of theoretical frameworks of
its own.

35. For a list of historians working with the Old Bailey transcripts, see <http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Publications.jsp> [accessed 26 August 2015].
36. Karl Bell, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), p. 228.
37. Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 6.
38. On this connection, see Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., Victorian Carnivalesque, Victorian Literature
and Culture, 30.1 (2002), 36581.
39. See Darren Webb, Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque, Theory,
Culture and Society, 22.3 (2005), 12138; Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the
Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 19798; John K. Walton,
The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), pp. 1819.

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If this would materialize, it might be possible to view the Victorian period in a more
complex light. The studies mentioned here point to the coexistence of restrained and
expansive behaviours in the nineteenth century. The apparently hegemonic position of
restraint that occurred in the latter half of the century was an historical anomaly rather
than a development in an ongoing process. The allure of the dirty, cocky ambivalence
associated with the working classes was present all the time and proved sufficiently
irresistible to some illustrious persons that one might see it as an integral part of elite
culture rather than its other.40 A photograph of the sons of the Earl of Suffolk shows
the two young men posing in their country house dressed in worn and tattered tweeds.
One of them rests languidly on a pillar while the other sits slumped into a chair.41
What artefacts like this show is that the formal culture of Victoriana can present a
vibrant and essential forerunner to the twentieth-century preoccupation with the
informal and shabby chic. In the sartorial binary between uptight gentleman and
rugged labourer, the labourers conduct and style was established as the major fashion
influence by the end of the twentieth century. In a similar vein, one might question
whether manners in the twentieth century were actually informalized. Research in
the sociological field of symbolic interactionism, for instance, would suggest that
late twentieth-century behaviour was governed by an informal formality, shaped
by a strict code of conduct in which the aspiration was towards appearing relaxed and
natural.42 The remarkable thing is that the same paradox underpinned Victorian
etiquette; a meticulous run-down of rules and advice followed by a reminder to
always be natural.
Certainly, a disciplining and civilizing discourse existed alongside raucous practice
in the nineteenth century, and it would be foolish to emphasize one at the cost of the
other. So why do scholars persist in devoting such disproportionate attention to the
former in comparison with the latter? The ongoing study of Victorian bourgeois novels,
journalism, and political processes from the perspective of Foucauldian disciplinary
power or governmentality, or through the prism of the Eliasian civilizing process will
hardly generate surprising results anymore. Although some new studies of such material can still engender exciting observations, the picture of the nineteenth century as
the era of bourgeois efforts of discipline is now as established, unexciting, and partial
as notions of the Dark Ages or feudalism once were.43 What efforts in history from
40. This proposition has received very little attention. See Mike J. Huggins, More Sinful Pleasures?
Leisure, Respectability and the Male Middle Classes in Victorian England, Journal of Social
History, 33.3 (2000), 585600, and Andersson, Street Life in Late-Victorian London, p. 205.
41. The photograph is reproduced in Fred Miller Robinson, The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History
and Iconography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 19.
42. See Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic
Books, 1971); Lyn Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the Citys Quintessential Social
Territory (New York: de Gruyter, 1998); Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014).
43. Some examples of new work using traditional sources include Yoonjoung Choi, The
Bi-Cycling Mr Hoopdriver: Counter-Sporting Victorian Reviving the Carnivalesque, Critical
Survey, 24.1 (2012), 10215; and Tom Scriven, The Jim Crow Craze in Londons Press and
Streets, 183639, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19.1 (2014), 93109.

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below or extra-verbal history indicate is that the Victorians as we see them in novels,
government records, or portrait photographs are Victorians at their best behaviour. The
poststructuralist scholar deconstructing such material would not agree that they are
behaving well, and so looks through this veneer, but here is where other perspectives
need to be invoked. As Martin Hewitt states in his insightful response to the V21 manifesto, we should explore the limits to which our understandings hold, not the means
by which they can be obliterated.44
In popular culture, court records, handicrafts, and amateur photography, we see
the Victorians without their civilized masks, and the culture we encounter there tells
a different story; one that is not merely a curiosity or something to be left to the local
historians and genealogists. It is only through a constant attention to peripheries, deviances, and misbehaviour that a historical diversity can be acquired. Unless Victorian
scholars do some soul-searching concerning their reliance on metropolitan, elitist, and,
not least, exclusively British sources, this discipline will keep presenting a biased picture
of a historical period.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Peter K. Andersson
Lund University
peter.andersson@hist.lu.se

44. <http://profmartinhewitt.com/2015/03/26/v21-manifesto-ten-alternative-theses> [accessed

26 August 2015].