Lost Victorians

In hot pursuit of political success during the early 1980s Margaret Thatcher famously invoked a set of 'Victorian values': belief in duty, patriotism, self-help, and so on. That these values were highly selective almost nobody seemed to mind. This is symptomatic of what we might call the 'loss' of the Victorians - the way in which an intimate appreciation of the people and values of the nineteenth century has slipped from the popular consciousness.

Of course this 'loss' might hardly be cause for surprise. As people recede into what the novelist L.P. Hartley called the 'foreign country' of the past, their values become alien and the intricate details of their lives susceptible to easy generalisation. This is a process which happens to every historical period or generation - no doubt the Victorians had a similar experience with their own memories of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. But the 'loss' of the Victorians in the twentieth-century has certain features unique to our own time.