A Victorian Poem

Dear Reader,

I hope your summer is going spectacularly well. It’s been a slow one, but a ridiculously hot one. Probably hot for most of us. I’ve been a nomad between Europe and North Africa and am returning to France in a couple of days. I’ve also been tinkering away at a second Substack focused on royal jewelry and royal history, Crown & Chronicle. It focuses solely on the past, not on anything modern, gossipy, or mean. If it’s your cup of tea, I hope you’ll stop by to check it out. Books & Victorians is absolutely not going anywhere. I just needed to separate the articles and stories related to jewelry and royalty from here to there to avoid this newsletter becoming a messy hodgepodge. (For example, this article on Fabergé eggs will need to move over to Crown & Chronicle.)

That’s the news on my end. What have you been up to this summer? What have you been reading? Watching? Writing?

Leave a comment

Also, as an encore, I thought it would be fun if we could revisit a Victorian poem we’ve already read here before. “To A Lady Who Declined An Invitation” by F.J.F. was originally published in The Sixpenny Magazine in July 1868.1

At first glance, the poem appears to be light-hearted. Each stanza has a rhyme, which tends to make a poem feel lighter and livelier.

But after a second or third reread, the reader might notice dark undertones. There appears to be criticism of the oppressive social norms Victorians lived through. The narrator can’t enjoy an outing with the lady he likes without gossip mongers ruining their lives. The narrator hints at the “strange, stiff world” they endure. The poem ends with a resolution to not care what “babbling neighbours think or say.”

Brave and daring, considering that it was easy to be thrown into an asylum (mostly for women) or lose your job if your employer felt that you were a liability to the company. But perhaps I have it all wrong. Maybe the narrator has nefarious ideas in mind, and that’s why he is upset with the observers? Or maybe the narrator is a she? What do you think?

Leave a comment

To A Lady Who Declined An Invitation
“You would not go with me,” you said;
It would not do, it was not proper;
Which put to my request a stopper.
I went alone–at home you stay’d.
Yet, thinking afterwards upon it,
I voted it an awful bore,
That you, and I, and many more,
Without a world to quiz and con it;
Could not a simple journey make,
Could not a trifling visit pay;
That we should be constrained to say,
In whispered words, with hearts that quake–
“How would the babbling neighbours talk?
How would each gossip shake her head?
Just think of all the scandal bred,
If you and I should–take a walk!”
A strange, stiff world, that every act
Must thus be measured out and weighed;
That we should have to be afraid,
Of how our neighbours take the fact.
That men may not say, “This I do,
Because I will, and it is right;”
But ask, in a perpetual fright,
“How will the world the action view?”
That we may not in word and thought,
Be governed by an innate sense
Of right and wrong, and so dispense
With all the puny trammels brought.
By a close keeping to the way
Which custom marks. That we may not
Leave it behind, unheeding what
The babbling neighbours think or say.
				F.J.F.

As always, thank you so much for being here and reading. Have a wonderful new week.