#reread this hours later and realized i went way overboard with the semicolons again. oh well

[spectre-ship]

What is it about the Victorian era that interests you the most? Specific decades, and also things like technology, social and intellectual movements, fashion history, etc. What do you wish was more well-known about the Victorians?

This is such a fun question! I've made two passes at this and they both turn out essay length, so apologies in advance for the beast of a post here, haha.

The overarching thing that I'd say fascinates me is that to study the Victorian era is to ingest a heady blend of modernity and antiquity--in so many ways the people of the 19th century were the architects of the modern day, and I'm continually surprised by the tiny ways in which the Victorian era feels so much closer than ~150ish years ago. And yet it's also so distant in so many ways, and particularly early in the period or in rural areas, the rhythms of life are quite alien to us. Madame Bovary is a novel about the wife of a doctor who mounts his horse to make house calls; the pharmacist in it keeps a jar of arsenic on his shelf; yet it's also a book where I thought "I know someone exactly like this" about pretty much every character. That to me is the fascinating thing about history generally, but especially about the 19th century, so far and yet so close.

I think this extends to pretty much everything. The books of the 19th century use mostly familiar words and the same punctuation as today, but across genres and authors there's such a distinct 19th century tone and style and word choice. Technologically the century is full of so many interesting first passes and middle chapters; the steel pen superseded the quill but is generally obsoleted today by the ballpoint, as an archetypal example. The list goes on.

In more specific terms: one thing I love is Victorian print culture. I'm a printing and typography nerd; I love the neat hairline strokes of 19th century body text typefaces, the wild maximalism of the era's display fonts. I love the seven column broadsheets that jam as much news as possible into four pages with zero pictures; I love the magazines and periodicals lavishly illustrated with steel and copper engravings. I love to imagine what they would have felt like to read when they were first printed, try to put myself in the shoes of the people of the past, get in their heads. (As my writing style probably indicates I have read far too many old books and newspapers, and as a result Victorian sentence structure and phraseology has irreversibly seeped into my brain.)

Fashion history is another big interest of mine. My big interest is in men's clothing, particularly around midcentury—the pinched waists and long hair, the puffy shirts and narrow pants. I like 19th century clothing generally, of course, and I like the Regency tailcoats and breeches, and the boxy sack coats of century's end, as much as the next guy; but something about that midcentury style is just my favorite. I don't have too much philosophy or deeper meaning on this one, if I'm being perfectly honest; I mostly just like the look, here. But I think fashion and textiles history is a pretty interesting field and well worth study in its own right. Learning what exactly broadcloth is, for instance, helped me understand much more intimately why one of the underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution was the textiles industry.

There's a lot of artistic and literary movements that I'm interested in; Victorian medievalism is always fascinating, I'm fond of Romanticism, and, well, maybe not quite so much Gothic proper, per se, but the post-Gothic echoes of Victorian literature, The Signalman and In A Glass Darkly and The Picture of Dorian Grey and Dracula, anything by Poe, the 'golden age' of ghost stories c. 1890-1920.

I could list off a great many other things that interest me—I'm fascinated by the early history of socialism (now and then lately I've been reading Karl Marx's correspondence and his old New York Herald articles,) I'm of course always interested in that historian's holy grail of Trying To Better Understand Everyday Life, I like architectural and art history, maritime history is a perennial favorite—but to write down every last thing would be to make this absurdly long post even longer, so I'll have to make this highlights reel suffice.

Things I wish were more well-known... I think this is maybe one of those topics where I know enough that my idea of what the "average person" knows is skewed, so I might have to sit on that one for a while before I can think up something interesting; I encounter a lot of odd and interesting misconceptions at work, but none of them are fresh in my mind. I suppose a classic go-to would be that 19th century clothing (and, honestly, historical clothing more generally) is way more comfortable than it looks.