Strange Victoriana: Tales of the Curious, the Weird and the Uncanny from Our Victorian Ancestors by Jan Bondeson
| Strange Victoriana: Tales of the Curious, the Weird and the Uncanny from Our Victorian Ancestors by Jan Bondeson | |
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| Category: History | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: One of the Victorians' favourite publications was the 'Illustrated Police News', which specialised in far-fetched but not always necessarily true stories from Victorian life. Prepare to be amazed, enthralled, horrified and amused in turn with this selection from its files. I doubt any readers today will find this book depraved or harmful. Whether our views on Victorian culture 'will change forever' after reading it, as the blurb claims, is open to question, but it makes an extremely entertaining read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 352 | Date: August 2016 |
| Publisher: Amberley Publishing | |
| ISBN: 978-1445658858 | |
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The Victorians, not surprisingly, had their own tabloid press. The most successful title of this nature was the 'Illustrated Police News', a weekly journal first published in 1864 and lasting seventy-four years. Not to be confused with the more upmarket 'Illustrated London News', its main stock-in-trade was weird, far-fetched but not always necessarily true stories from Victorian life, generally in Britain but sometimes in Europe as well. This book is based on a recently-discovered archive of the paper. Prepare to be amazed, enthralled, sometimes horrified, occasionally amused – and once or twice, understandably disbelieving.
In eleven profusely illustrated chapters, we learn first of all of the Victorians' voracious appetite for reading about such peculiar goings-on – human nature doesn't change much, does it? – and then enter what the author calls 'a fine gallimaufry (a magnificent word all too rarely used nowadays) of Victorian eccentricity and freakishness'. Take the opening chapter on medical freaks, for example. Some women were given to sleepwalking, and some survived, one thanks to getting her dress caught in a lamp-post. The author sagely observes that these somnambulists were invariably female, young and, being in night attire, often scantily clad. The same principle that sells 'lad mags' in this day and age held sway then as well. In the same chapter is a procession of Siamese twins, supposedly dead people buried alive, and strangest of all, Andrian the Russian dog-faced man and his son Fedor, who sadly earned their living by being 'put on show' as an exhibit throughout the European capitals of the 1870s.
The British being an animal-loving race, there were also strange tales of recluses who shared their houses with large collections of cats, dogs and monkeys, of children abducted by monkeys, and even eaten by pigs. Some of these were investigated and could not be corroborated elsewhere, suggesting a journalist's over-fertile imagination. The business of Joseph Troublet, a dwarf who was exhibited at fairgrounds with a number of cats painted with stripes to resemble tigers, which eventually tired of such treatment and put an end to it all by tearing him to pieces, also sounds a little too far-fetched to be completely true. However, some reports were certainly not fabricated. In the early 1870s, society was astonished and no doubt a little amused by the case of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, sometimes also known as 'Stella' and 'Fanny', who dressed alternately in male and female attire. They were charged in court with conspiring and inciting people to commit an unnatural offence, but it could not be proved that they had actually broken any law and they were acquitted. One of the closing chapters deals with 'crime and mystery', and all credit is due to the author for focusing on some unfamiliar incidents when it might have been tempting to include a number of the well-known cases.
Some people called the journal 'the worst publication in England'. At least one murderer admitted in court that after reading about a brutal child-killing in its pages and paying close attention to the lurid illustrations, he was incited to follow its example, while a clergyman was moved to write to 'The Times', regretting that in his country parish it had an extremely wide circulation. To those who denounced it as depraved and harmful, the proprietor retorted that he once knew a killer who had been influenced by a piece of criminal literature given him by his grandfather – a book featuring the tale of Cain and Abel.
I doubt any readers today will find this book depraved or harmful. Whether our views on Victorian culture 'will change forever' after reading it, as the blurb claims, is open to question. Every generation has had its oddities, peculiarities, eccentrics and even freak shows, as they were called. Nevertheless, it features an entertaining and well-presented procession which will certainly not disappoint.
For readers wishing to immerse themselves in more mysteries and misdeeds of the era, The A-Z of Victorian Crime by Neil R A Bell, Trevor N Bond, Kate Clarke and M W Oldridge is also recommended. You might also appreciate Carver's Quest by Nick Rennison or The Asylum by John Harwood.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Strange Victoriana: Tales of the Curious, the Weird and the Uncanny from Our Victorian Ancestors by Jan Bondeson at Amazon.com.
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