Stern Fathers, Religious Zealots, and Prudes?
Having spent much of my adult life studying the Victorian age, I have often been puzzled by the clichés and stereotypes of the Victorians that are so often repeated, not only in journalism but even in serious history books.
We are asked to believe that they were all amazingly puritanical, hung up on sex, so afraid of the erotic that they covered up chair legs with upholstery in case the word “leg” led their thoughts astray.
A recent book by social historian Dr Julie-Marie Strange has surveyed over 250 memoirs and innumerable other bits of evidence to shed light on “Fatherhood and the British Working Class”.
The picture that emerges from her study is very different indeed from the stereotype of what we imagine stern Victorian males to have been like. Although it was commonplace for mothers to scare their children, for example, by promising that Father would hit or strap them when he came home from work, Dr Strange has actually found almost no evidence Victorian fathers hit their children any more often than we do – perhaps rather less, in fact.
It seems as though David Beckham and Jamie Oliver were not the first generation of “new dads”. There were plenty of kindly Victorian men who loved their children and were loved in return.
But this is not the only way in which we may have been getting the Victorians wrong all these years.
Despite the puritanical stereotype, they were in many ways more relaxed about the human body than we are. Not long ago I read in the news that some naked bathers were being threatened by some local authority for having commited an act of indecency – just by skinny-dipping.
How different from the Victorians, who regularly bathed naked. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, one of their best diarists, described going to Weston-super-Mare in the 1870s and watching the crowds, all naked, gambolling in the water. “There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air, and running naked down to the sea”, he wrote.
Indeed, it was when he saw bathers wearing costumes that he felt shocked : the bathing costume implied there was something smutty about having been naked.
We are often told that the Victorians had a cruel justice system and, yes, they had the death penalty.
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