The theatricality of modern politics is an axiom available to every headline writer, every talk show host, and every college professor. National and international politics have become a branch of theater which is a branch of advertising. And most people who bother to note this commonplace complain about it. With the presidency of a movie actor, the headline writers have tended more and more to acknowledge the metaphor that animates their own activity. The press with its words and pictures, the newsreel, and then television have very self-consciously assumed the function of the stage in this century. Politicians step in as its actors while ad agencies produce, and we the people quietly sequestered in our living rooms play an uneasy role as a dispersed and silent audience, the weakest component of a global metaphor that has been with us at least since Shakespeare's time.

Locations, particularly public, popular locations, are constructed ideologically. By that I mean that places, like other artifacts in culture, accrete meaning and are in effect created by that meaning. The Haussmanization of Paris provides a particularly good instance of the way that the nineteenth-century city was newly conceived of as an organized, ideological system with a shape – a logic and a uniformity. When Baron Haussman attempted to impose the boulevard and sweeping avenues over the crazy quilt of the old quartiers, he was investing public place with public meaning. The nineteenth century particularly saw the rise of the concept of the public place. As the Goncourts noted in 1860, “The interior is passing away. Life turns back to become public” (Clark 34).

What follows is a meditation on the idea of the average in Victorian England and its implications for the way in which Victorian intellectuals conceived of the individual and his, and less often, her, relation to society. It is not a social historian's attempt to synthesize an average Victorian on the basis of statistical data. Nor is it a proposal to nominate some actual person for the title of “average Victorian.” G.M. Young, who had Victorian England in his bones and at his fingertips, once wrote an essay titled “The Greatest Victorian,” by which he meant, as he put it, not Victorianorum maximus, but Victorianum maxime – not “the greatest of Victorians,” but “the most Victorian of the Victorians.” He awarded the title to Walter Bagehot (Victorian Essays 126). Bagehot was hardly the average Victorian, but the distinction Young made does go to the heart of an issue which, as I hope to show, concerned the Victorians: what was the relation between the average, mean, and normal – statistical notions – and the typical, characteristic, or quintessential – nonstatistical notions but still related to the average in ways at once obvious, and yet elusive.

By the beginning of World War I, a separate culture of girlhood had taken shape in Britain. “Girlhood” had its own interests, values, and (perhaps) ethics; its own language, customs, and literature. Fifty years earlier, when publishers first began to identify readers in a category which they differentiated from the adult audience on the one hand and the general children's audience on the other, they were not quite sure who girls were and what they might be interested in. Publishers' advertisements used terms such as “the girl from 8 to 18” and “those who have left the schoolroom but not yet entered society.” The earliest girls' magazines, which appeared in the last quarter of the century, opened their readers' contribution pages to “girls” up to the age of twenty-five. Mid-nineteenth-century fiction about girls generally emphasized home life and home duties, but by 1900 many books dwelt on the values and interactions of girls themselves, with hardly any mention of adults. As a first step in discussing the creation of girlhood – and the values, attitudes, and understandings which this creation encoded – the case of L.T. Meade is instructive.

Two of the most popular forms of culture in the nineteenth century, and perhaps those to which Victorians had access at the earliest stages of their lives, are nursery rhymes and the Christmas pantomimes. The latter were and still remain the most financially successful of English dramatic forms. Indeed, they kept most of the nineteenth-century theatres open, including even the licensed theatres, and nowadays the pantomime accounts for about one-fifth of the live-theatre tickets sold in England every year. The two forms are connected, of course, because so many of the pantomime characters and plots were taken from the nursery tales.

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.

In 1876 Robert Browning published Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper: with Other Poems. In the title poem of this volume Browning answers the critics who had been nipping at him for decades, and at the end of it Browning threatens that his housemaid (his muse) might toss the slops from a skoramis (chamber pot) upon their heads. The image of a chamber pot so used is generally thought to be humorous, as it is in Candide's encounter with a Dutch religious zealot or in a similar scene in Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding.