A VICTORIAN PORTRAIT
Asa Briggs and Archie Miles
New York: Harper & Row, 1989
220 pp., $ 29.95
The Victorian era has been making something of a comeback in the last few years. But this resurgence of interest and respect for the culture of Victoria's reign comes after decades of hard press. Like almost any other epoch in history, the Victorian age was scorned by its immediate successors. In Britain, the writers who made up the Bloomsbury group spent much of their literary energy deriding the hypocrisy, priggishness, and philistinism of their parents' generation. Bloomsburyite Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), with its witty, satirical, and iconoclastic approach to such figures as Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Henry E. Manning, and Thomas Arnold, set the tone of elegant condescension toward the Victorians which took a half century to reverse.
But a century after they trod the earth, those stuffy parsons, statesmen, and educators continue to exercise a powerful influence over our institutions and values. A number of political commentators, for example, have pointed out the affinities of such world leaders as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for the Victorian values of self-reliance, hard work, and the sacred duty of economic advancement, (Hostile critics simply call Reagan and Thatcher social Darwinists.) In the recent debates over the quality and scope of higher education, crusaders like William Bennett and E.D. Hirsch have upheld Matthew Arnold's definitions of culture, first made in the 1850s, against those who wish to deny the centrality of the classics of Western thought and literature.
The Victorians are increasingly seen as our contemporaries in their preoccupations with technological change, the awareness of the disparity between the "haves" and "have-nots," and the uncertainties about ancient beliefs that have come under attack. As the Russian and American empires of the twentieth century continue to unravel, Victorian attitudes toward their own British Empire take on a fresh perspective.
A Victorian Portrait thus provides a fascinating window onto this era through the medium of photography. Published to coincide with the recent celebration of 150 years of photography, this handsomely produced book is authored by the historian Asa Briggs, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and author of three major studies: Victorian Cities, Victorian People, and Victorian Things. The photographs and their captions are provided by Archie Miles, a professional photographer who has amassed an impressive collection of more than ten thousand Victorian cartes de visite and cabinet portraits.
The year 1839 saw the development of the first practical technique for producing photographs. In one of those strange historical coincidences, this technological breakthrough was achieved simultaneously by Frenchman Louis Daguerre and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, who were unaware of each other's efforts. While the daguerreotype quickly acquired many patrons - perhaps chief among them being Queen Victoria herself, a lifelong enthusiast for photographs - the real explosion came with the invention of the "wet plate" process, which not only reduced the exposure time but also allowed for the fast and inexpensive making of multiple
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