The modern urge to study humankind on a new, scientific basis took many, often strange, forms in the nineteenth century. For example, the pseudo-sciences of phrenology, whose heyday was between 1820 and 1850, and craniology, which followed it, attracted many followers. That man's physical and, by extension, moral, intellectual, and social development, could be determined by, and seen in, his physiognomyÑin, say, jaw structure and frontal forehead developmentÑwas to many a respected science that enjoyed wide currency. (When the archvillain, Moriarity, meets his adversary Sherlock Holmes for the first time, his immediate comment was, "You have less frontal development that I should have expected.") The prognathous (protruding) jaw became a sign of lower development and of a closer relationship to primitive man. It also became the basis of much racial stereotyping of the Irish, and phrenologists argued that the working classes were more prognathous than the upper.
In his very influential book, The Races of Man (1862), John Beddoe, the future president of the Anthropological Institute, emphasized the vast difference between the prognathous (protruding) and orthognathous (less prominent) jawed people of Britain. The Irish, Welsh, and significantly, the lower classes, were among the prognathous, whereas all men of genius were orthognathous. (Beddoe also developed an Index of Nigressence, from which he argued that the Irish were close to Cro-Magnon man and thus had links with the "Africinoid" races!) One should emphasize, however, that such craniological and anthropometric studies "always represented a minority" of the papers presented at the Anthropological Institute, 1871-1899. (See Lorimer, "Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology, 1870-1900."
©A.W
In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.
More than anything else what
makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social responsibility, a basic
attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate predecessors,
the Romantics. Tennyson might go to Spain to help the insurgents, as Byron
had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to France; but Tennyson also urged the
necessity of educating "the poor man before making him our master." Matthew
Arnold might say at mid-century that
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land
of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so
new,
Hath really neither joy, nor
love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor
help for pain.
but he refused to reprint his
poem "Empedocles on Etna," in which the Greek philosopher throws himself
into the volcano, because it set a bad example; and he criticized an Anglican
bishop who pointed out mathematical inconsistencies in the Bible not on
the grounds that he was wrong, but that for a bishop to point these things
out to the general public was irresponsible.
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©Anthony Wohl
©Harlam Wallach 1994