Victorian emotional culture stemmed in part, then, from an unusual moment in middle-class religion, when effective doctrinal changes created an environment in which God could be seen as supporting positive emotions but also in which many individuals came to regard intense, earthly love as a spiritual experience in itself as they made a transition away from more conventional religious commitments. Other cultural currents, notably social Darwinism, also supported the dominant emotionology after it had been established, providing it some new vocabulary and a scientific aura; but the link with religious adjustments remained more crucial.
The causes of Victorian emotional style were thus varied, which is no surprise. Despite the temptation to seek a single main ingredient in a functionalist interpretation of emotionological change, historical reality suggests that a larger emotional culture requires a number of overlapping factors for its genesis and dissemination. The Victorian style built clearly on prior cultural change, combining a host of specific factors, such as the new need for greater sexual abstinence in the interest of birth control, that impelled particular emotional formulations as part of the larger framework. It adapted emotional trends to the apparent needs of an industrial work environment and the tensions of social class relations in the growing cities. But it also incorporated important cultural shifts, including a new and puzzling distance between emotion and the body and two kinds of religious imperative that reflected a distinctive combination of confidence and concern. No one of these ingredients suffices to explain the Victorian mixture. Correspondingly, as we will see, when this skein began to unravel, the process responded to changes in most of the supporting elements as both social and cultural functions shifted ground.
Impacts: The Public Sphere
Describing an emotional culture offers the challenge of identifying common elements in discussions of particular emotions and in varied kinds of popular media. Explaining how this culture arose and what needs it seems to have filled forms the next step in analysis, challenging in its own right. These first two steps are meaningless, however, unless a third can be completed as well: indicating that the emotional culture had genuine resonance, affecting the way people believed and behaved.
Victorian emotionology had impact. This is certain despite the impossibility of ever demonstrating with full precision exactly how many people merely mouthed certain beliefs or exactly how they carried belief into action. More middle-class parents continued deliberately to use fear in childrearing than Victorian standards recommended, but a growing number accepted these standards at least in part, either changing disciplinary behavior or regretting anachronistic impulses or both; but how many fell into which camp cannot be determined. We do not know how many young, middle-class men actually experienced the transcendence of Victorian love or how many sustained the passion after marriage (when even the prescriptive literature suggested some lapse from perfection).23 Yet without claiming exactitude, it is possible to demonstrate impact. Victorian emotional culture, distinctive in itself, helped shape a distinctive emotional reality.
The best means of sorting through the impact of an emotional culture is to proceed through three layers, the first of which is, frankly, the easiest. If an emotional culture does not affect public arrangements, then it is scarcely worth talking about. People responsible for translating emotional standards into laws and organized activities inevitably reflect the values preached around them, whether they internalize these values in their own emotional lives or not. The fact that this first impact is obvious—public culture and organizational behavior inevitably coincide to a degree—should not obscure its importance. Victorian experience was shaped in significant ways by changes that responded to or reflected the new emotional values. Even if no private echoes of these values could be found—which is not the case—the salience of Victorian emotionology for “real life” would be amply demonstrated—along with, admittedly, a strong dose of hypocrisy. As will be shown, the first layer of cultural impact, at the level of institutional response, displays clearly the Victorian impulse not simply toward repression of undesirable emotional impulses but also toward the promotion of essential intensity.
In 1904 Andrew Carnegie set up a trust for the Carnegie Hero Fund to provide moneys for people who had been injured performing heroic acts, or for survivors of people killed in such acts:
We live in a heroic age. Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows; such the heroes of civilization. The heroes of barbarism maimed or killed theirs.24
Carnegie’s fund followed on a common newspaper genre that had developed by the 1890s, featuring stories of ordinary people who, as one journalist put it, “were suddenly confronted with the question of whether or not they would risk death to save the lives of others” and describing “the manner in which they met, without preparation or forethought, that supreme moment.” Feature stories and the special fund for heroes obviously institutionalized Victorian concepts of facing and conquering fear. They institutionalized the stuff of boys’ stories, emphasizing the ability to experience intense emotion and channel it toward socially useful ends. They highlighted the importance of spontaneity and impulse against any Victorian temptation to stodgy caution. The purity of the emotional experience was primary.25
The Carnegie Fund was not a transformative organization in America, though thanks to the wonders of capitalist investment it survives to this day. But along with the public expressions of belief in courageous mastery of fear written into boy scout literature, newspaper stories, and other genres, the fund did concretely express the extent to which Victorian emotional values could be translated into action. Some Victorians, clearly, were willing to put money where their emotional commitments lay.
Victorian emotionology translated abundantly into sports. There are all sorts of reasons for the rise of sports in the nineteenth-century United States, but among them, and particularly important in the distinctively American enthusiasm for introducing