"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins journalist Matthew Sweet's mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. In the words of historian E.P. Thompson, the Victorians have been victims of the "enormous condescension of posterity." Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical, and, worst of all, earnest. Oh, how wrong we are, argues Sweet in this entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great- and great-great-grandparents. On the centenary of Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and the images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the "love that dared not speak its name" declared itself fairly openly. In 1868, the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences. Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own.--Adapted from dust jacket.