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The image of repression has long haunted Victorian culture. Most reconstructions of twentieth-century Victorianism assume a blanket repressiveness. Partisans of the civilization-of-manners schema developed by Norbert Elias assume that Victorianism simply extended and stiffened already-brewing efforts to constrain impulse and rigidify emotional and physical habits. John Kasson illustrates this connection for the American middle class in the nineteenth century by exploring etiquette standards, recommended audience behavior, and emotional control. Twentiethcentury popularizers began a process of labeling Victorian repressiveness early on, attacking, for instance, old-fashioned notions of childrearing. Even before Dr. Spock in the 1940s, traditional insistence on children’s docility was criticized, and greater openness to expression and attention to childish needs were urged. Victorian school discipline came under attack in the 1920s, with recommendations for greater flexibility and responsiveness to individual traits. By the 1960s, contrasts between contemporary freedom for self-expression and repressive Victorian gloom became a staple, particularly, of course, in discussions related to sexuality.¹ In scholarship and popular opinion alike, Victorianism and constraint often go hand in hand.

Defining Victorianism as repression is a considerable oversimplification. In some respects, the twentieth-century fascination with labeling and condemning Victorianism owes more to the needs of this century than to the characteristics of the previous one. Blasting Victorian shibboleths is a convenient means of trying to persuade contemporary Americans that they are truly free—and in the process concealing the many constraints that in fact have been introduced in our own time. Victorianism was to some extent invented after the fact, to simplify the twentieth century’s own self-satisfaction; with such a repressive past, progress became easy to claim.

The imagery is not all wrong. The Victorian emotional style contained strong repressive elements. So do all emotional styles, but even so, Victorian repressiveness in some respects went unusually far. Children were routinely enjoined to obedience, a recommendation that could cover a host of parental efforts to keep their offspring in line. Many Victorian childrearing manuals seem amazingly undetailed by current standards, largely because the injunction to obedience could cover such a multitude of sins. Sibling spats, for example, were almost never mentioned, and a leading reason for this was that the larger dictate, to obey parents’ commands, reduced the need for attention to such petty emotional or behavioral details.² Correspondingly, when attention to sibling quarrels began to increase, by 1920, one reason was that the blanket insistence on obedience was now dismissed as outdated and repressive, requiring a new, more nuanced attention to specific problem areas.

In addition to the routine insistence on obedience, Victorian popularizers showed their repressive side in many other ways. Women in particular were to be kept in emotional check, and this standard contributed to many of the symptoms of distress disproportionately present in the nineteenth-century middle class, including the kind of hysterical paralysis suffered by repressed figures like Alice James. Victorian men and women alike frowned on spontaneity; uncontrolled impulse was a mark of poor breeding and a real social and personal threat. To this extent the civilization-of-manners schema fits Victorian goals fairly well. Emotions required monitoring, and children were taught this lesson early on. Generalized injunctions to obedience were combined with serious warnings about the dangers of displaying anger within the family, particularly toward parents. The margin of tolerance was narrow. Even as Victorians moved away from physical punishment—which was a constriction of parental spontaneity widely preached from the early nineteenth century onward—other disciplinary systems, including isolation of children, maintained a severe pattern of will breaking.³ Finally, Victorian popularizers talked a great deal about the importance of rationality and calculation, which fits a century devoted increasingly to business planning, growing organizational sophistication, and heightened faith in formal education. One of the real differences postulated between men and women involved men’s natural superiority in matters of the head and women’s corresponding inferiority because of weak-minded sentimentality—and the resultant imagery, along with its gender impact, constrained both men and women to distrust emotional tugs.

There is no convenient reversal for the Victorianism/repression oversimplification. Victorians cannot be seen as emotionally tolerant, certainly not as freewheeling. Accurately characterizing their emotional style requires subtlety and must acknowledge a strong repressive element. Aspects of Victorianism have been invented to bolster twentiethcentury self-confidence, but the characterizations are by no means entirely off the mark.

Revisionist views of the Victorian style have already been applied to sexuality, and the close relationship between this area and emotion warrants a brief comparison. Traditional scholarship on Victorian sexuality played the repression chords resoundingly; Victorians, or at least Victorian women, were turned into virtual museum pieces of unimagined repression. Victorian popularizers, like Lord Acton in Britain or some of the American faddists like Kellogg, were trotted out to show how Victorian women were told that all sexual impulse was wrong and, in women, unnatural, dangerous to propriety and physical health alike. For a time, the scholarship on Victorian sexuality could be summed up in the image of the respectable woman told to endure the indignity of the sex act by lying back in a darkened room and “thinking of England.” This standard was supplemented, for males and females alike, by instructions not to damage health by contemplating sex more than once a week, to shun sex before age twenty-three, and to avoid masturbation like the plague it was—this last injunction being enforced by bizarre physical constraints on male adolescents and even institutionalization for insanity.⁴ Surely Victorianism and repression were identical where sex was concerned. Actual Victorians might evade the repressive standards—male users of the double standard and consumers of prostitution and pornography were most commonly cited—but even they were indirectly constrained, condemned to furtiveness and to the separation of “respectable” male-female contacts from healthy sexuality.

Yet it turns out that this image, amusing or appalling as it might be to twentieth-century eyes, was simply not accurate. Victorian prescriptions did include some extremists, but they were atypical. Popular advice varied, and it generally recognized that a moderate sexual appetite was legitimate. Women were considered less sexual than men, to be sure, but even for women, physical and mental health required some regular sexual expression; occasional procreation was not the only goal. Writers on marriage, though hardly in the Masters and Johnson league, assumed that sexual satisfaction was an important ingredient in marital love. A few revisionist historians have gone so far as to assert a quiet Victorian sexual delight, citing married women who acknowledged not only their reliance on sexuality and their dismay when sex relations had to be curtailed for reasons of birth control but also their frequency of orgasm—a frequency that, if taken literally, actually surpasses contemporary twentieth-century self-reports. Yet extreme revisionism can go too far.⁵ Victorian attacks on child and adolescent sexuality were quite real, and they had some impact even in married adulthood, when a less repressive regime was widely advocated. Victorians did respect the validity and importance of sex, but they distrusted overemphasis on it and sought other primary bases for heterosexual relationships. A fully accurate formula for the subtleties of Victorian sexuality has yet to be worked out, but while it would include due notice of some special repressive features (and the needs that underlay them, such as birth control and social and gender hierarchy), it would not simply end with the repressive theme. Just as a twentieth-century flight from sexual repression is a simplistically misleading conception, so the Victorian acknowledgment of sexuality’s validity must be included in any characterization.

Students of Victorian emotionality have launched a reevaluation similar to that applied to sexuality. Although some recent work plays up the repressive theme alone, the idea of Victorian emotional repressiveness has been substantially modified. The various modifications need to be drawn together and then integrated into a more accurate vision of the nineteenth-century baseline. Yet the analogy with sexuality must be made with caution. Victorian sexual repressiveness was by no means complete, but it was more pervasive than was repressiveness in the emotional arena. In fact, Victorians hoped to use emotional opportunities to deflect certain kinds of unwanted sexuality, particularly in courtship.⁶ Thus the repressive model is farther off the mark where emotions were concerned than where sexuality was involved. This distinction is vital to an understanding not only of Victorianism but also of the changes that followed in the twentieth century.

For Victorian acceptance of emotion was in principle quite wholehearted. Natural emotions were basically good, though they must be controlled and properly targeted. Even less fortunate emotions, like anger or even fear, whether natural or not, could be put to good use. “No person should be afraid of his finer feelings,” wrote one Pittsburgh minister in 1880, capping a long evolution away from early nineteenthcentury sermons in which a more traditionally Calvinist gloom about this world and its works had prevailed. Victorianism was born, after all, in an atmosphere shaped by romanticism and its appreciation of emotion, or at least of sentimentality. To be sure, Victorianism was also shaped by the Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of reason. However, the driest kind of rationalism was modified at the level of practicing intellectuals, and it had never caught on widely among the reading public.⁷ In contrast to sexuality, then, emotion was not regarded with anxiety and suspicion. Management and appropriate use, not systematic limitation, were the guiding principles.

The Victorian emotional style began to take shape in the 1820s, building on many of the emotionological principles that had developed in the previous century, including a strong emphasis on family emotionality.⁸ For about two decades, a new genre of family advice literature, partially secular though heavily informed by Protestantism, suggested a sentimental tone that, beginning in childhood, could maintain family harmony. Prescriptive writers, like Catharine Sedgwick, writing from a Protestant perspective but generally without emphasis on religious goals, emphasized several emotional criteria for an appropriate family life, some of which they explicitly contrasted with more traditional standards.⁹ Loving relationships were essential.¹⁰ The 1830s saw the genesis of an unprecedented fascination with motherlove. The Reverend John Todd told the readers of Mother’s Magazine in 1839 that “God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring, in the mother’s heart.” From this love, in turn, would come the inculcation of appropriate affection in the children themselves, male and female alike. “It is the province of the mother, to cultivate the affections, to form and guard the moral habits of the child, for the first ten years of life, and to all intents and purposes the character of the man or woman is substantially laid as early as that period of life.”¹¹ The equation of love and morality was virtually a commonplace in prescriptive literature from the 1830s onward, though in fact it was a substantial innovation in a culture that had traditionally doubted that human affection could be compatible with an appropriate focus on things divine.

The emphasis on love spilled over to other family relationships. Portrayals of siblings emphasized their deep affection. A staple of popular middle-class fiction involved sisters so deeply loving that the introduction of an outsider in their midst, in the form of a successful suitor for one of the sisters constituted a great crisis of emotion. Deep affection was also routinely portrayed in discussions of brother and sister, though here qualified by the different strengths each gender could bring to a relationship. The Rollo series for boys involves many an episode in which Rollo saves his sister from some disaster, demonstrating courage and affection simultaneously.¹²

Love between spouses also received high praise as one of the chief benefits of family life. “Men find so little sincere friendship abroad, so little true sympathy in the selfish world, that they gladly yield themselves to the influence of a gentle spirit at home.” Love and serenity were closely linked in this image, providing the essential emotional underpinning for a growing commitment to hearth and family. Emphasis on the special emotional qualities of women was linked to the other durable image being generated at this point—the idea that women had special domestic qualities, including appropriate emotional warmth as wives and mothers.¹³

The focus on loving families prompted other emotional standards as well. Most obviously, emotions that might jeopardize affectionate family life were now discredited, and a good-bad dichotomy based on family impact was developed. Here, too, trends in the prescriptive literature built on the earlier shift in emotional culture toward family centeredness and self-control, but with new fervor deriving from the heightened emphasis on family intensity.

Fear was reassessed. A standard argument from the 1830s onward held that children would have no reason to develop fear “unless it was put into their heads.” Fearful adults, or even worse, reprobate adults who used fear as part of discipline, were seen as disrupting children’s emotional tranquillity. The obvious solution was to urge adults, particularly mothers, to swallow their own fears lest they induce them in their children, “embittering the whole existence of her offspring.” And all adults must be prevented from deliberately scaring their children: “She who can tell a frightful story to her child or allow one to be told, ought to have a guardian appointed over herself.” No obedience was worth the poison of fear when affectionate, gentle guidance could win even better results without negative emotional side effects. Even safety was no excuse for inducing fear. A child made afraid of spider bites might get bitten just as easily as a child who had not been terrified, and bites are preferable to a “fear that troubles one all life long.” Servants who delighted in scaring children came in for particular criticism, as the middle class and popular culture began to diverge. “It is utterly impossible to calculate the evil” that imposing fears could wreak on sensitive souls. Instances of actual death resulting from children’s fears were cited in warnings about a host of traditional disciplinary measures that must be rejected as an “undefined species of horror.” Loving motherhood, not corroding terror, provided the emotional lodestar for parents. As the God-fearing qualities of religious virtue began to decline in mainstream American Protestantism, a fearful individual was no longer considered appropriately pious. Rather, he or she was emotionally crippled, incapable of taking the kinds of initiatives or displaying the kinds of confidence desirable in middle-class life. Most obviously, if fear became an emotional link between parent and child, long-term affection would be excluded even if short-term discipline was served. Fear, quite simply, became an emotional abuse of parental authority, a theme that continued through the twentieth century in virtually all the prescriptive literature.¹⁴

A key facet of the new campaign against fear in childrearing involved the presentation of death. American Calvinists had long emphasized death images as a means of inculcating religious obedience in children. Elements of this theme persisted into the nineteenth century, with authors like James Janeway writing that unrepentant children were “not too little to die,” “not too little to go to hell.”¹⁵ But middle-class opinion was shifting rapidly, and the idea of sinful children who deserved to be frightened by terrifying images of death became increasingly distasteful. By the 1820s, clergymen who refused to accept the growing, romantic belief in childish innocence were frequently confronted with rebellious congregations, so that many changed their tune or at least sought refuge in silence. Lyman Beecher and others helped steer Protestantism away from emphasis on original sin and its corollaries infant damnation and legitimate fear of death. Avoidance of fear again related to the larger emotional package being developed by the early Victorians. In 1847 Horace Bushnell ventured a synthesis: “A proper nurture could counteract mere ‘tendencies’ to depravity if nurture began while wickedness was weakest—that is, in infancy. … Kindness, love and tender care by a mother who exemplified all the virtues would adequately prepare the child for salvation and a life of moral responsibility.” Lydia Child anticipated the sentiment in her Mother’s Book in 1831: “They [infants] come to us from heaven, with their little souls full of innocence and peace; and, as far as possible, a mother’s influence should not interfere with the influence of angels.” The lessons obviously applied to the presentation of death. “Great care is required that children do not imbibe terrific and gloomy ideas of death; nor should they incautiously be taken to funerals, or allowed to see a corpse. It is desirable to dwell on the joys of the righteous in the presence of their heavenly Father, freed from every pain and sorrow, rather than on the state and burial of the body, a subject, very likely, painful to affect the imagination.” Happiness was the key: death was to be presented as a joyous release and an opportunity to achieve the greatest possible serenity. Thus a child might be told, on the death of a playmate: “she would like to live but she was ready to go … she had a happy life in this world but felt sure that a still happier one awaited her in the next.”¹⁶ Epitaphs, similarly, were altered to displace fear with religious cheer:

Go peaceful Spirit rest

Secure from earth’s alarms

Resting on the Saviour’s breast

Encircled by his arms.¹⁷

The overall message concerning fear was unambiguous: it must not disrupt the positive emotional bonds between parent and child. Fear was an “infirmity” that was “most enslaving to the mind, and destructive of its strength and capability of enjoyment. … How cruel, then, purposely to excite false terrors in those under our care.”¹⁸

Anger was the second emotion to be excised from family life.¹⁹ At least as much as fear, anger could corrode the affection essential to the family. Fiction in the popular women’s magazines around midcentury, and advice literature even earlier, crystallized this belief in an endless series of accounts of the horrors of first quarrels. “Cultivate a spirit of mutual and generous forbearance, carefully abiding anything like angry contention or contradiction. Beware of the first dispute, and deprecate its occurrence.” “Quarrels of every sort are exceedingly destructive of human happiness; but no quarrels, save those among brethren in the church, are so bitter as family quarrels; and … should be so sedulously avoided.” Women particularly received advice about their role in promoting domestic serenity, for it was noted that, unlike their husbands, they were cushioned from the frustrations of business life. Wives’ good temper was vital because men needed solace from their harsh workday realities. But men were held to the same domestic standards. William Alcott, in an advice book for husbands, intoned: “The reign of gentleness. … is very much needed in this jarring, clashing, warring world.” Phrenologist Orson Fowler noted wives’ sensitivity, such that a single “tart remark” might make her wretched. Anger, quite simply, was too dangerous to play with, for even a little dispute might so contradict the loving tranquillity of the home, the “soul blending” that a real marriage involved, that irreparable damage might ensue. “Let [the First Quarrel] be avoided, and that hateful demon, discord, will never find a place at the domestic hearth. Let it have its existence, no matter … how brief its duration, the demon will feel himself invited and will take his place, an odious, but an abiding guest, at the fireside.”²⁰

First-quarrel stories drove the point home by describing ensuing disaster. An angry wife makes a husband so ill that he almost dies, though in this case reform saves the marriage. A man’s anger leads to his wife’s death and also to the ruin of most of his children. A wife, repenting her stubborn anger too late, sees her husband go off to India, where he dies. Another wifely outburst causes a man to seek solace in the woods, where he is almost killed by a falling tree. Another angry wife almost dies herself: her face reddens with rage, every vein swells and stands out, every nerve quivers, foam covers her lips, and finally she falls as blood gushes from her nose and mouth. The theme of possession by rage, and accompanying references to demons, recalls an earlier set of beliefs about the causes and consequences of emotional excess, but the principal focus at this point was family misery. The result was an extremely rigorous standard, in which true love and harmony forbade a single harsh remark between husband and wife, and avoidance, rather than conciliatory strategies, held center stage. Here was Victorian emotional repression at a peak. For not only was anger to be shunned, but the early Victorian formula also held that one party was always to blame in any lapse: anger identified the bad person, which left the good, calm party free from responsibility. Anger showed bad character, pure and simple. And while occasional remarks suggested that men might not be as gentle as women because of men’s work responsibilities outside the home, there was no particular emphasis on a wife’s obligation to suffer anger in silence. The gender difference with regard to anger lay in the notion that men had to work to live up to standard while truly feminine women had an inherent gentleness that excluded even the need to exercise self-control. Correspondingly, though this was rarely explicitly stated, an angry woman was worse than an angry man.²¹

Anger between parents and children was condemned as thoroughly as that between spouses. Indeed, proper childrearing would so exclude anger as to create the personalities (presumably, particularly in women) that would later allow the marital standards to hold sway. Given growing assumptions about childish innocence, it was thought that if parents controlled their own anger, children would not learn anger themselves. “I say to any father or mother, are you irritable, petulant? If so, begin this moment the work of subjugating your temper.” “Fretfulness and Ill temper in the parents are provocations.” Fortunately, self-control and, above all, maternal love, calm, and cheer could save the day; few manuals between 1830 and 1860 dwelled on childhood anger as a particular problem. In the event that parental models might fail, prescriptive writers offered uplifting children’s stories featuring George Washington’s efforts to control his temper and good boys who avoided responding angrily to taunts. But mother was key. “A mother must have great control over her own feelings, a calmness and composure of spirit not easily disturbed.” “And can a mother expect to govern her child, when she cannot govern herself?” T. S. Arthur, that ubiquitous advice giver of midcentury, put it more simply still: “As mother is, so will be children.” And the goals of avoiding or subjugating anger applied to boys as well as girls. When children were being discussed, emphasis on the bestiality of anger and its inappropriateness in family life took precedence over any effort to delineate gender traits. Anger was bad, and a good family would escape it. Correspondingly, though the connection was not elaborately explored, anger in a husband or wife was frequently blamed on a bad upbringing that left the individual “spoiled” or “capricious.”²²

As with anger and fear, so jealousy came under new scrutiny when early Victorians applied the familial lens to emotional standards. Redefinitions of this emotion had been anticipated in the earlier reevaluation of family emotionality, but because jealousy was not seen as posing the same kind of threat to family harmony as anger or fear, it received less articulate attention. But the implicit shift was considerable even so.²³

In the first place, when jealousy was mentioned it was now focused primarily on love relationships, particularly among courting couples and married adults. (Children’s jealousy came in for little comment at this point.) Earlier ideas about jealousy in defense of honor or jealousy as a spur to righteous action (this last a recollection of the emotion’s original etymological link to zeal) simply disappeared amid the new concentration on family emotionality.

In the second place, romantic jealousy, when discussed, was now uniformly condemned. Earlier Western tradition had been ambivalent on this point. Some authorities, like Shakespeare in Othello, had attacked jealousy’s tendency to possess a person and poison a couple’s relationship, while others had praised jealousy’s capacity to add spice to love and even to bring about greater commitment in love. Amid early Victorians, ambivalence officially withdrew: when jealousy was formally assessed, it was condemned. For jealousy contradicted the purity of love, adding a selfish and possessive quality that fouled this now-precious emotion. “There is no real love where there is no abandon and complete confidence.” Love, whose “truest, purest, highest form is that of strong, unselfish affection blended with desire,” “ennobles” the individual; it is “the beautifier, the glorifier, the redeemer.” Marriage itself was “complete union of amity and love, of life and fortune, of interests and sympathies, of comfort and support, of desires and inclinations, of usefulness and happiness, of joys and sorrows.” Small wonder, then, that popular commentary occasionally reminded middle-class readers of the dangers of jealousy. Godey’s Ladies Book ran a verse on “The Jealous Lover” in 1841, terming the emotion the “worst inmate of the breast; a fell tormentor thou, a double pest, wounding thy bosom by the self-same blow thy vengeance wreaks on the imputed foe.” An occasional story showed how baseless jealousy might ruin a romance while causing great personal agony. Young women’s jealousy of sisters or cousins who were being courted occasionally set the theme for a moralizing fictional comment. In one case, a woman is briefly assailed by the “old demon in her breast” but rises above it, rejoicing to God for “awakening her to a nobler life and higher aims than that of mere self-gratification.” Because real love so obviously made jealousy unnecessary by the mutual devotion and selflessness it entailed, jealousy was seen as requiring far less attention than anger. But the evils of jealousy, which could spoil love and prevent proper self-control, were quite similar. “We may even blight and blacken our happiness by jealousy, which is really an admission of our own inferiority, of our own cowardice and conceit.”²⁴

Finally, early Victorian emotionology began a process by which jealousy came to be viewed as a disproportionately female problem. To the extent that romantic jealousy had long been seen as a sign of weakness, this attribution had some precedent. Other traditional uses of jealousy, however, as in the pursuit of honor, had been disproportionately masculine. No more. Women’s family focus and their own sentimental, loving nature made them particularly susceptible. “As in matters of the heart in general, females are more susceptible to the passion than men.” By the same token, some popularizers argued that women should exercise particularly repressive vigilance: “Jealousy is, on several counts, more inexcusable in a woman than in a man.” Because women’s principal emotional contribution was selfless love, and because as a practical matter jealousy might drive a suitor or spouse away, women needed to keep their possessiveness under wraps. Other stories, while implicitly confirming jealousy as a female issue, suggested a bit more leniency. A housewife’s manual in 1858 described a woman’s growing jealousy of her husband’s preoccupation with work. She is ashamed of her feelings but grows increasingly distracted by them. Finally the husband becomes aware and includes her in his work (in appropriately simple terms). Jealousy in this case is not good, but it can be handled by a compassionate male response with the result that a marriage is recemented.²⁵ When jealousy was considered female and therefore somewhat understandable, and when it might quietly enforce a couple’s unity, it was open to constructive adjustment. Here was another reason why, though officially reproved and considerably redefined, jealousy drew less concerted fire from Victorians, early and late, than did anger or fear. Again, the litmus was the impact on family ties, which in this case, in practice, proved modest.

Overall, the early Victorian emotional style was disarmingly simple, though potentially demanding. Building on the earlier focus on family ties, it also incorporated an initial reaction to the growing separation of work from home. However, although emotional life outside the family was evoked in references to life’s storms and the pressures on men as agents in this murky world, standards for nonfamilial emotions were not set. Real emotion meant family, and family meant solace and calm.²⁶ Emotions that supported this, various forms of love being atop the list, were good and were praised without reservation. Emotions that threatened it were bad and were condemned. Adults were urged to restrain themselves and spare their children in this ominous second category.

The result could be oppressive. Women especially were urged into a single, exiguous emotional mold: they must love, but they had no other legitimate emotional outlet. Anger, in particular, was denied them, and even fear had to be tightly controlled. At the same time, they encountered some criticism for disproportionate emotionality, a vague claim that nonetheless served as an additional constraint. But men had severe emotional chores as well, even though their emotional nature was not so narrowly defined. For both genders, difficult emotions were degraded as bestial or animal-like, and loss of control harked back to demonic possession.

Whether this culture’s prescriptions were thoroughly repressive might be debated, for the early Victorian style certainly did not seek to limit all emotion, nor are we certain about readers’ actual acceptance of prescriptive advice. Yet, while the standards added up in principle to a tidy package, from childish innocence to marital and parental harmony, their very idealism invited dismay over sordid realities. These standards led to criticism of emotional reactions by other family members and, even more, to criticism of one’s own impulses, with repressive consequences. Quite apart from the obvious attack on “bad” emotions, the sanctity of harmony and the drumbeat emphasis on serenity offered emotional rewards of a sort, but also a deadening uniformity—and they put a serious damper on any emotional flare.

Important elements of the initial Victorian formula persisted into later nineteenth-century emotionology, including some of its gender implications and the real tensions between emotionality and a longed-for calm. But the early Victorian statement was not the final word. From the later 1840s onward, new ingredients were blended in. The mature Victorian emotional style, which would in most respects persist into the early twentieth century, inserted previous emotional standards into a much more complex amalgam. Family no longer ruled so completely, though its special domain was acknowledged, and the primacy of tranquillity yielded to a growing delight in appropriately targeted emotional intensity. The Victorians became increasingly, though selectively, passionate.