How the Victorians Un-Invented Themselves: Architecture, the Battle of the Styles, and the History of the Term Victorian

Contemporary scholars offer contradictory accounts of when and why the term Victorian first came into use: some credit its introduction to the Edwardians; others insist that the Victorians 'invented themselves' on or about either 1851 (thanks to their newfound 'self-consciousness') or 1875 (thanks to Edmund C. Stedman's anthology on Victorian poets (A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895 (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895)). Though the adjective was in fact introduced as early as 1838, architecture and debates about it played a major role in its popularization, beginning in the 1860s - paradoxically, the very decade in which the grieving queen from whose name the term derived infamously absented herself from the public stage. The so-called 'battle of the styles' that raged especially fiercely in those years continued well beyond them and involved at least four separate conflicts - (1) that between defenders of Classic and Gothic styles; (2) that among defenders of various forms of, or approaches to, Gothic; (3) that generated by calls for a new, definitively modern style; and (4) that surrounding efforts to distinguish the architectural profession from both building or contracting and archaeology or antiquarianism. Largely conducted through the term Victorian and over its various potential meanings - or lack thereof - these 'battles of style' paradoxically helped to popularize the idea of a 'Victorian age' and a distinctly 'Victorian' style by rendering the latter intensely problematic. The Victorians did invent themselves, but they did so out of anxiety about their own lack of inventiveness.