In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles' 1969 fictional deconstruction of the Victorian novel, the narrator claims that Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is "the best guidebook to the age" because "every Victorian had two minds." This was perhaps true because the Victorian Age was a period of such widespread intellectual, social, and technological change that the human psyche was torn between keeping pace with change and lingering in the once-stable comfort of hitherto self-evident "truths." We should hardly be surprised to encounter divided consciousness in an age in which the ideas of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud were radically challenging once-familiar ways of thinking.

Moreover, the Victorian Age made a fetish of respectability while celebrating the supremacy of the individual spirit. Rigid codes of dress and behavior coexisted with post-Romantic philosophies of independent thinking and personal meliorism; a strict class system dominated social relations while various social and religious movements aimed to upgrade public morals and recognize nobility in good deeds; and while propriety and dignity were social standards to which the middle classes aspired, desperate economic conditions smothered the lives of the poor.

Some illustrations to ponder: During the Victorian Age, women were considered sacred, and the monarch herself was known to have strenuously high-minded moral convictions. On the other hand, journalist W. T. Stead learned that he could purchase a 16-year old virgin on the streets for the right price. There were more churches built during Victoria's reign than during any other sovereign's, but one in 60 houses in London was a brothel. Victorian literature rarely describes any intimacy more bold than a kiss; however, the pornography industry was brisk, its menu of sexual variations depicted was varied, and those depictions were audaciously thorough. One last illustration: The scantiness of tent-lavatories at Ascot (a race track frequented by the upper classes) resulted in men relieving themselves in full view of the women present, while those same women referred to the item of clothing that these men publicly unbuttoned as "unmentionables."

When an age is so rife with contradiction, the human spirit is likely to mirror such inconsistency and ambiguity. While Stevenson's Gothic tale describes a man whose mind is split by the competing drives of respectability and brutality, Oscar Wilde's drawing room comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) portrays a man with two social selves. Jack/Ernest explains, "as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one's health or one's happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes." Stevenson and Wilde probe the same quandary: how do you maintain your footing in a rigorously formal and proper society, and yet manage to do precisely what you want? The Victorians were perhaps the first people to make an art out of answering that question.

The objects in this exhibit illustrate some of these contradictions and tensions in Victorian society. Many of the clothing items draw our attention to the modesty and propriety expected of the middle classes. The glassware and "china" embody the pride and triumphalism of a nation that was the pre-eminent global power – ruling over roughly a quarter of the world's population. The books on display remind us that Victorian writers often confronted the complex realities of Victorian life. While history reveals that this was a period of often reckless industrial growth, that the extremes of poverty and wealth in Britain were morally obscene, that the class system perpetuated ancient social inequalities while creating and justifying countless new ones, and that Imperialism catapulted all of these damages into other corners of the globe, literary study assures us that Victorian writers (such as George Eliot and Charles Dickens) could critique all of this frankly and pointedly, and with great humanity and compassion.

Sweeney Todd similarly invites us to reflect on a Victorian story of mayhem and revenge, a tale that suggests how the abuse of power can twist and damage human lives, and how attempts to right these wrongs sometimes lead only to more destruction and pain. The theme of doubleness is conspicuous throughout the play: several characters have hidden selves, disguised pasts, secret identities – two faces. They mirror their own society, an England that was never more powerful than when it was in dispute over many of its most fundamental beliefs and convictions.

Paul M. Puccio