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Saw a thing on TikTok and I have to agree:
The more you learn about history, and the more you study the period, the more any rational and decent person should ***loathe*** the Victorian era, anything from it, and anything that calls back to it.
Truly the nadir of human civilization.
They ruined historical artifacts of every possible variety, wiped out scores of civilizations, did monstrous things to their own fucking children--there is literally not a single thing from the Victorian era that is an unmitigated good.
No, not that thing.
Yes, including literature.
And before you ask:
Yes, I studied this dumpster fire of an era at the doctoral level. Specifically, my specialization in lit was the Enlightenment (which was also awful, but has A FEW decent things, such as the Irish independence movement), and the frickin MOMENT that The Castle of Otronto appears is the end of anything remotely redeemable about England especially and the entirety of Europe for the most part for a good century or so.
The volume of what was annihilated by the Victorians as immoral, and which are now lost forever, with only references in biography and journals and history, is truly beyond measuring.
So, like... Keep that in mind when you watch a costume drama next time, okay? Because all those pretty gowns and tasteful parties only existed because they gave little boys scrotal cancer at 7 from chimneysweeping so the houses wouldn't burn down and little girls dying from mercury poisoning for making the hats they wore.
And before someone calls toward the birth of modern feminist literature in the era:
Go read the Xtian Mystics. Seriously. Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen (who was sainted!), and dozens of others who came centuries earlier--that feminist lit only had to premiere because IT HAD BEEN WIPED OUT! BY THE VICTORIANS!!
Even the worst of the women Mystics were vastly more feminist than the costume fiction authors in the Victorian era, and they wrote CENTURIES before it.
All largely true.
Also, one of my bugbears is equating the 19th century with "Victorian". She was born in 1819 and came to the throne in 1837. Over a third of the way into the century.
So much bad stuff that happened in the early 19th century is routinely mislabelled as Victorian.
The Castle of Otranto was published in 1764. What the fuck does that have to do with Victoria?
Calling this shit Victorian is just blaming the woman. For stuff that happened before she was born.
@regordane Otronto, and the birth of the neo-Gothic art movement, represented the foundations upon which much of the horrors of the era rested and relied upon. The focus on wealth and power and status, the acknowledging and simply accepting the realities of daily monstrousness, while protesting purity and claiming them as essential. Otronto, and the neo-Gothic perspective it gave birth to, normalized it all by claiming the weight of history and the distortions of power itself were an equal, if not greater, burden. Otronto was not the beginning of the Victorian era--it was the overture, in the way that the 80s culture of greed celebration ushered in our modern day of oligarchy (as the Victorian era truly began with the voices of Keats and Tennyson and Shelley).
And yes, Victoria came to the throne later, but the era as a whole bears her name because she was emblematic of its values and perspectives, not because she caused this-or-that. Victoria herself frankly did relatively little of note differently from her predecessor or successor; but she did these things loudly, forcefully, and in a way absolutely unapologetically typical of the era.