Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets by John Woolf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Entertaining, Informative but Busy Documentary Listening to Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets (2018), written by John Wolf and Nick Baker, read by Stephen Fry, and performed by several actors, is like listening to a spicy BBC documentary series in which the witty host goes time traveling in the 19th century to introduce us to some sensational examples of odd features of the Victorian era. Here are the twelve episodes: Episode 1 “Family Secrets” is about secrets relating to race and legitimacy: “Families could protect against shame by keeping secrets, so secrets became the glue bonding the family together.” Episode 2 “Buckingham Palace Freak Show” relates the Victorian appetite for freaks like Tom Thumb and the Last Aztecs: “Buckingham Palace gates were revolving doors for freaks.” Episode 3 “Pornography, Pleasure, and the Press” demonstrates how the Victorians, far from being uptight prigs about sex, were pretty open about many aspects of it (and even thought that the female orgasm was necessary for good conception). Episode 4 “Forty Elephants and Other Dangerous Women” focuses on the opposite figure to the Victorian Angel in the House: the dangerous woman like Mary Carr, the leader of a gang of forty female thieves whom the police finally put away by framing her for a fake child kidnapping. Episode 5 “Afro-Victorians” points out that anti-slavery didn’t mean anti-racism and depicts black people in England as exotic entertainer outsiders. Episode 6 “Victorians Underground” is fascinating and fun, being all about sewers and cemeteries, water closets and earth closets, and cholera epidemics and premature burial fears. Great stuff on the “toshers,” crime gangs sailing the sewers, their scavenger work hazards (gases, vermin, collapses, and mazes) and rewards (coins, spoons, jewelry, metals, etc.). Also relates the work of the “night soil men” and the history of toilet paper and why women’s drawers are called drawers and why the British call the toilet the loo. Episode 7 “Beauty and the Beards” demonstrates the exaggerated differences in appearance between Victorian men and women, with men pressured to grow beards (to be manly for the empire) and women pressured to stay beautiful forever (via dubious beauty products). Episode 8 “On the Wilde Side” focuses on male homosexuality, one of the secretest of Victorian secrets because in much of the Victorian era buggery was punishable by death or transportation. Much of the homophobia of the era was connected to the fear that homosexuality left untreated would infect and topple the empire. Episode 9 “In and Out of the Asylum” reveals that on the one hand the Victorians had some progressive attempts to care for the mentally ill, building big facilities for them in which to feel better by working and getting fresh air and enough food), but that on the other hand in the myriad private hospitals doctors and orderlies were free to do whatever they wanted to patients, including horrific treatments, punishments, and abuses. Episode 10 “Woman to Woman” covers homosexual love between women, beginning with a unique example in Ann Lister, who, in the very start of the Victorian era was “the first modern lesbian” in the sense of having a series of female lovers and never feeling guilty about it. She did, however, recount her sexual relationships with women in her four million plus diary words in code (that was not fully cracked till 1980). Interestingly, for Victorians, lesbianism didn’t exist, so there were no laws against it, unlike for male homosexuality. Episode 11 “Séance, Science, and Messiahs” is about the spread of mesmerism, spiritualism, and Messianic fervor in the Victorian era. Episode 12 “Secret Sherlock” is the least interesting one for me, because I’m somewhat familiar with the great detective. But it was neat to find out just how rampant drug use was in the Victorian era, with 1 in 4 men being addicted to morphine, cocaine being the drug for exotic brainy types like Holmes, and people relying on opiates for pain relief (aspirin wasn’t invented till 1899), with 26,000 sellers of opium in the UK in the 1850s and local countryside communities growing their own opium crops, etc. To immerse us in Victorian England, the audiobook uses many sound effects: people being hanged in public, crowd noises at a circus, scissors cutting hair, ghostly knocking noises, seagulls crying, etc. Unfortunately, the background piano music is pretty constant and distracting. The voice actors playing the different historical personages are fine. Fry as narrator is entertaining, but at times he tries a little too hard to be arch, pregnantly pausing or exaggeratedly emphasizing, his voice assuming an unctuously winking quality. To be something of a documentary, the audiobook also features several American and British Victorian era scholars who pop in and out to say their relevant and interesting research findings and informed opinions. In each episode, I found Fry (and or his authors) jumping around from this topic to that topic and back too much. I guess the intent is to avoid boring the listener by focusing on any one thing for very long, but it gets a bit frustrating. Experts in the Victorian era may not find so much of interest here, but people relatively new to it or very interested in it should spend an entertaining and informative time with this audiobook. View all my reviews
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