By CAROL CHRIST [RaVoN – Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net] – In the same year that Victorian Studies began publication [1956], Walter E. Houghton published The Victorian Frame of Mind. Houghton’s characterization of his work bears certain resemblances to the preface I have just quoted. Houghton also explicitly distances himself from the antipathies with which earlier twentieth-century writers viewed the Victorian period to argue that the age has a complex and individual character, best understood through a comprehensive analysis using texts with little attention to distinctions of field and genre.

Fundamental to Houghton’s definition of the Victorian frame of mind was self-consciousness of its own historicity. Today such historical self-consciousness hardly seems remarkable; we define the character of each decade as we live it. Houghton claims that such historical self-consciousness had its origin in the Victorian period: “For although all ages are ages of transition, never before had men thought of their own times as an era of change from the past to the future.” Houghton cites John Stuart Mill, who opens his essay “The Spirit of the Age,” by calling attention to the novelty of the expression: “The idea of comparing one’s own age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come, had occurred to philosophers; but never before was itself the dominant idea of any age.”

Houghton’s book was not the first to seek to define the character of the Victorian mind. G. M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age was first published in 1936, although Young dates the beginning of the project to his efforts during the First World War to understand the Napoleonic wars. Like Houghton, he defines the kind of history he aspires to write as “not what happened but what people felt about it when it was happening.” Both Houghton’s and Young’s attention to the historical self-consciousness of the Victorian age leads us to wonder about the term itself. When did the term Victorian come into common usage? When did people start to refer to the decades of Victoria’s reign as the Victorian period? When did the attempt begin to define it? And how is this related to the historical self-consciousness that Young, Houghton, and many subsequent scholars identify with the age?

The answer is surprising.

Continued at RaVoN | More Chronicle & Notices.