The 19th Century and The Victorians.

Who were the 'Victorians'?
Winston Churchill was a Victorian.
Adolf Hitler was a Victorian.
Mahatma Ghandi was a Victorian.
My grandfather was a carpenter who built aircraft in the first World War;he was born in Victorian times.
All of the IRA were Victorians when they broke Ireland out of the UK.
Nearly everybody in 1914 was a Victorian.

The Victorians shook the world. But that was just at the end of the Victorian era.
The 19th century was 37 years old when Victoria came to the throne; at that time the Royal family didn't matter much.What mattered was the steady erosion of religious prejudice in Britain, by people such as the Duke Of Wellington, the prime minister now that he had retired from the Army, the 'Sepoy General' who had been disappointed in the Napoleon he defeated. He passed the Emancipation Act which allowed Catholics back into public office.

This was a 'velvet revolution' which averted a real one.
And that is the real story of the Victorians, people who fought for freedom all through that century, sometimes with guns, sometimes with words.

Marx was a Victorian; as was Engels.

Every commonplace in the modern idiom is due to the Victorians.
But we don't think of it that way.
Because-the Victorians have been buried, and all these iconic figures represented as being in opposition to the age or appropriated by and for later times.

In other words, there has been a huge conspiracy, a fraud to divest an age and culture of all its assets.

And leave us with a cardboard dummy representing the projections of the children of a later age, resenting the fact that adults once walked this land.
So what, today, is a 'Victorian' supposed to mean?
A collection of inversions.
Dogmatic(in an age of freedom)
Ignorant(in the birth of science)
Poor(in the age of planetary conquest)
Mortal(in the biggest population explosion ever)
Miserable(in the age of America)
Hypocritical(in the defining time of integrity)
Repressed(in the explosion of Romantic Art)
Silent(in the age of Romantic Music)
Suffering(in the invention of popular dance)

...and so on.
Hey kids!Never mind all these idiots!Look at Marx!

I mean, come on.
Pull the other one,eh?
What the hell do these ancient teenagers take us for?

And poor sods like John Major tried to return us to this age with woefully light references such as 'back to basics', a Victorian defence which had already been outmaneouvred by everybody from Dickens to Zola.
So now we have a latter day giggle-fest, with the difference that they finally feel safe from adult intervention.