Victorianism

Even seemingly unshakeable axioms are prone to reassessment by historians, and Victorianism is no exception. Even the very period of Victorianism itself stands challenged: historians no longer refer unquestioningly to the North-West Passage (1874) by John Everett Millais. Oil on canvas. A strong patriarchal influence and the importance of family were prominent values in the Victorian Age, possibly, some say, because there were so many societal obstacles for families to overcome. © THE ART ARCHIVE/TATE GALLERY LONDON/EILEEN TWEEDY "Victorian Age" as the precise years associated with the monarch but instead concentrate on a shorter period—a "high age"—from about 1830 to 1880. Yet critics shadowed the entire period in question, and the negative connotations were fired dramatically forward soon after the period ended, notably with Lytton Strachey's (1880–1932) mocking attack Eminent Victorians (1918). Moralizing, prudish, repressed (and repressive), and old-fashioned (rather than traditional)—each of these notions captures what Victorianism has meant to later generations.