#victorian values

[leathernap]

The Rothchild sisters had no difficulty in controlling the family. That included bringing their overbearing father to heel. He now lived in his own meagre loft space ,restrained chained to the wall wearing a leather hangman's mask. One bowl of gruel to keep him alive enough to feel the painful, degrading and evil treatments the sisters so enjoyed

[ragpicker-and-poet]

Classic

[separating-my-porn-and-tjlc]

Reading adult books as a kid

Two books I read as a kid went right over my head: Catcher in the Rye and The Green Carnation

Actually, let me back that up. Catcher in the Rye is amazing to read as a child because, in my case, at least, I was very willing to see the world from Holden’s perspective. It was easy for me to do that. I read it in third grade, so I was about 9 years old, and I thought it was thrilling that there was a sex worker and a pimp in the story. I really liked it.

Then, I had to read it for school when I was 15 or 16. Unreliable narrator, obvious. I had grown as a person during that gap, probably more than in any other period of years in my life. It was a completely different experience.

Well. For the kid who grew up fast but apparently not fast enough, the subtext of The Green Carnation was not easy for me to grasp. Or rather, the context wasn’t. I remember thinking I was ready to read it, priming myself with a thought like “Remember: conservative Victorian values--yadda, yadda, yadda, let’s get this gay clown car on the road!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOO!”

I was so desperate for anything gay I could access. It felt like there was nothing. I’d read The Picture of Dorian Gray and walked away feeling immensely disappointed in how not scandalous it felt. I thought The Green Carnation would be much different! It would be the thing that opened my world.

But uh... Like damn, I looked so hard and couldn’t find even a hint of bedsharing. Like that was what I really wanted. I’d read this book in my elementary school library (Neil Armstrong Elementary in Scranton, PA in the U.S.) called Goats where a boy and a girl who are bullying victims are left stripped and wet in a lake or something, and there was this uncomfortable detail about how the girl’s cold and wet nipples looked, and I remembered thinking “aha! if I’m allowed to read this, certainly some gay background vibes must exist in this library!”

Well.

Well...

I came away from that book wondering “Where was the scandal?” (in the book, since I knew about the historical context) and I really only liked my Frank Harris book about Wilde and my collection of Oscar Wilde’s letters I had, which I was able to buy from a library that was getting rid of their hardbound copy. To this day, I take great comfort in the shiny library dust jacket on that massive tome of a book.

SO yeah. Had to get that out of my head. NOW, I understand much more what I’m looking for. I’m embarrassed to admit that even as late as watching TAB, I grew to understand better.

[brancusi7]

Today is the 178th Anniversary of the Battle of Bosenden Wood 31st May 1838 by Alan Denney Via Flickr: When local farmers saw that "their" labourers weren’t turning up for work they sent a constable to arrest the man who’d lured them away, the self-styled, Sir William Courtenay. Courtenay killed the constable and the local gentry immediately sent for the army. On 31st May 1838 150 soldiers of the 45th Regiment found the 36 labourers in Bosenden Wood, killed 9 of them and wounded 12 more, two of them had pistols and the rest just had sticks, a young lieutenant was shot and killed. (The following year this same 45th Regiment was used to put down the Chartist rising in Newport, there they killed 22.) Lest we forget : These were desperately poor family men marching behind a pole with a loaf of bread fixed on top, they could probably have been bought off with a wage increase of a few pence but instead of that the toffs panicked and they became casualties in the last battle on English soil. Print: National Army Museum, London Barry Reay "The Last Rising Of The Agricultural Labourers" Clarendon Press, 1990

[timey-ivy]

Has anyone ever recognized how Walter’s parents in Doctor Who: The Snowmen, are just like:

“He doesn’t talk to other people and it’s wrong.”

*Both walk away and don’t actually help their child*

[squirrelingbeaver]

Victorians were famously averse to physical activity — which was for the proles — and they saw carrying extra weight as a marker of class and respectability. Fitness and sport began to infiltrate middle-class life in the twentieth century, and today serves the same function as the promenade.

[...]

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers.

[...]

Of course, exercising, eating organic food, and pushing children to use their spare time usefully are not inherently bad things. However, they become markers of bourgeois values when they are marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority over another and to justify social inequality. It was just as obnoxious in the nineteenth century as it is today.

We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone. Imagine if all of the energy used to get mediocre, upper-class children into prestigious colleges was redirected into making higher education more accessible and affordable across the board. Imagine if access to healthy food for all was prioritized over attaiting status through buying the most virtuous products. Imagine, in short, what our world would look like if socialist values — not Victorian ones — dominated.

[kisara-albino]

Victorian Values

Kisara, now a widow, and now one of the most wealthy women in London. She had grieved for her husband’s death several month earlier, and now decided to make her way into the future. The first step of this was to make use of the various businesses her husband had left her, a variety of shipping companies that essentially gave her control over almost all of London's ports and harbors. As such, it would be a wise decision for anyone with the wish to move something, legal or no, to make friends with her. As was the purpose of this gathering tonight, placed in her new home near the outskirts, a rather elegant bit of Victorian architecture. The exterior was coated in a lovely red brick, while the interior was finely decorated, red carpet coating most of the house, maple paneling on the walls, and intricate gold figures carved into the skirting on the floor. The party was a rather elegant affair, several musicians having been hired that night to play Kisara’s favorite composer’s works, Beethoven. The lady of the house smiled a bit, hidden behind her elegant blue bird’s mask as various guests began to arrive, signing into the book at the entrance.

@rarehunterhafsah

[theaxismundi]

Ode Grows Impatient

After some time in the surface city, Ode becomes annoyed at the differences between their treatment of children and writes about it formally in his logbook.

Day 89?-

No change. The government of this place is inefficient. There is a whole group of nine people in charge, so they all argue. While they seem old and wise, they treat me like I am an infant, not a full crewmember. They seem to think the older crew were “nursing” me, and so they refuse to make any decisions about me until one of them wakes up. When I try to argue, they pat me on the head and tell me I am “an independent young lad.” I am tired of this child’s treatment. As for now, all I can do is wait for Sitana to finish working. Or learning. Whatever she is doing. They don’t all go to school, so I believe this is how older children learn. So I will wait, just like I did yesterday, but I am preparing to take care of this situation myself.