In 1918, Lytton Strachey declared that 'the history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it.' But he wasn't quite right. The real problem is this: we have systematically forgotten many of the most interesting and distinctive aspects of the period, and much of what we think we know about it is utterly false, fabricated in the twentieth century and lazily accepted as truth ever since.
Spot the deliberate fiction on this list: Queen Victoria had a Nigerian god-daughter; William Gladstone once knocked back so much laudanum that he had to go to Baden Baden to recuperate; the flourishing Victorian porn industry was founded by a group of Chartists who wanted to use sexually explicit material to hasten the British Revolution; Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, negotiated a fifty-fifty box office split with his management team; Britain's first black professional footballer was Arthur Wharton, who played in goal for Preston North End and Rotherham in the 1880s and 90s; Sarah Grand, the author of the phenomenal 1890s bestseller The Heavenly Twins, fronted a publicity campaign for Sanatogen; sexually, Oscar Wilde was a pretty regular Victorian guy.
As this radical myth-busting reassessment of the Victorians and their world demonstrates, the answer is: none of the above.
