Who owns the Victorians?
Sir: The Spectator owes much of its readability to the powers of caricature, so it may seem churlish to complain of Peter Ackroyd's account of the History Workshop on 'Victorian Values' (28 May). All the same, his article seems more con- cerned with massaging readers' prejudices than engaging with, or even reporting, what was being said. If there were 'sniggers from the back' when Lord Blake spoke, I did not hear them, and I doubt whether Lord Blake did: perhaps Mr Ackroyd is endowed with extra-sensory perception. None of the `modish cliches' which he holds UP to ridicule — 'models', 'matrixes', 'symbolic structures', `patterns' — appear in the published account of the proceedings. It was also suggested that the public pieties of an age are a poor guide to its prac- tice; that Mrs Beeton's Cookbook is a bet- ter guide to the moralities of middle-class house-keeping than Samuel Smile's self Help; that Black Beauty might tell us more about the character ideals of the age than The Lives of the Engineers; and that the Smilesian virtues were less important in shaping the dominant institutions of the age than the more patrician qualities of leader- ship championed in the Victorian public school. None of these arguments are the prerogative of the Left nor, I think, are they obviously contemptible. Mr Ackroyd's sociological caricature of the speakers as the privileged children of the Welfare State also seems wide of of the mark — it is difficult to see what purchase It has on the Canadian grandson of a Czarist minister (see Michael Ignatieff, 'FamilY Album', History Workshop Journal 12). Finally it is disingenuous of Mr Ackroyd not to mention that the Workshop wassceo; sponsored by 'something called' the Statesman. The proceedings were published week's eaV issue of h ri aon that journal. rsnuaip p. lement to last k s Raphael Samuel
Ruskin College, Ox ford
Previous page
