That's what I was talking about at lunch with Em. In general we view the Victorians in a certain way. Buttoned up. Proud. Industrious. But they also did all of these things that seemed antithetical to the way we read the period. Which I'm sure happens any time people who've lived after try and encapsulize the essence of those who've lived before. Just as it happens every time you try and peg someone you don't really know. It's just easier to forget to imagine people complexly when you're looking at a whole era of them.

William Gibson has a great quote about that sort of thing, that I posted to the writing tumblr a while back:

If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. Of course, we might be Victorians, too.