[Those curious about the history of the Victorian Web (which began before the WWW in another hypermedia environment) might be interested to learn that this document was one of the very first written specifically for what became this site by someone outside Brown University. (The materials on public health that Professor Wohl also contributed came from his previously published book — GPL.]
Both Victorian science (pseudosciences such as phrenology), and popular literature assigned similar characteristics to the Irish, Blacks and members of the lower classes. Both were seen as:
- Unreasonable, irrational, and easily excited
- Childlike
- Having no religion but only superstition.
- Criminal: no respect for private property, no notions of property
- Excessively sexual
- Filthy
- Sharing physical qualities
- Inhabitants of unknown dark lands or territories ( Mayhew).
How do these ideas contrast with those of the Victorian Gentleman?
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- Arthur Conan Doyle as Defender of the Unjustly Accused — Racism and the George Edalji case
- The Dysfunctional “Family of man” — Mary Anne Venning and Barbara Hofland Classify Human Races in Pre-Darwinian Primers
- "Black Voices from the Past": Beverly Andrews introduces the poet Phillis Wheatley, the artist's model, Fanny Eaton, and the sculptor, Edmonia Lewis
- Review of Patrick Brantlinger's Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Vornell UP, 2011) by Diane Greco Josefowicz
- Review of Lee Jackson's Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Hall to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment (Doubleday, 2019) by Jacqueline Banerjee
Created 1987
New entry added 15 August 2024