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| Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman keep the fires burning. |
The Chrismans might be called “lifestyle antiquarians”. Or “anthrochronologists”. Or “practical archaeologists”—I’ve struggled with phrases to describe them exactly. They are fascinated by the latter Victorian period, and have decided not only to study it, but to live like people of reasonable means in the years 1880-1900. And so, they reside in a 128 year-old house in Port Townsend, a town with much surviving Victorian architecture. They wear Victorian clothes, and read Victorian literature (high and low) by the light of Victorian oil lamps. They sleep on a feather bed, and keep and prepare their food with Victorian appliances, using recipes gleaned from period sources. And so on.
They make concessions to practicality. There’s an old Isuzu truck parked in front of their house; Sarah pursues her writing career with a steel-nibbed fountain pen, but is still reachable by email. They have a PayPal account. “No one understands better than us that we can’t completely recreate the past,” says Gabriel. The vast infrastructure for that—the gas works and the ice deliverymen and the parts to repair their period machines—no longer exist.
So why do they bother? There’s been a lot of chatter about them on the interwebs, reacting to their project with varying degrees of fascination, incredulity, and scorn (e.g., see here). The word “twee” comes up a lot, as in “those twee hipsters”. As much as most people bother to process it, the Chrismans’ lifestyle is dismissed as a particularly rabid form of nostalgia—a Masterpiece Theatre obsession run amok.
The reality is far more interesting. Sarah is trained in cultural studies, Gabriel as a historian and archivist. As they conceive it, the Victorian period was not a superseded style obliterated by progress. It was literally what novelist L.P. Hartley called the past—“a different country” where things were done differently. It was a place where real people lived, with a real culture that was not at all “twee” to them. And so, like any good pair of cultural anthropologists, the Chrismans became “participant observers” in this different community, immersing themselves far beyond the reading of monographs and the attending of scholarly conferences.
Is their immersion complete? Of course not (see above). What they mostly have left to participate in are the processes of material culture: what’s it like to light a period oil lamp? (Answer: it’s easy, but there’s a knack to it.) What’s it like to wear a corset all day and all night? (Answer: it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d assume.) What’s it like to visit the ladies’ room in a full-length Victorian outfit? (Answer: Victorian undergarments are more hygienic, and more friendly to female anatomy, than their modern equivalents.) What’s it like to keep time with a period watch? (Answer: difficult, because the electromagnetic fields we moderns live in tend to gum up the components.) The Chrismans have, through their experiential studies, recovered knowledge of the past that is simply invisible to conventional historians, because the written sources don’t bother to discuss such mundane, everyday things.
Alas, contemporary attitudes have become a drag on their project. Due largely to the BBC and Hollywood, most people have a vaguely pleasant sense of Victorian aesthetics, but a hostile one to its politics. The very word “Victorian” is often used as a pejorative, synonymous with classism, racism, sexism, and sexual prudery. “The past is garbage” is an attitude that can be voiced in polite society, even though, as Sarah argues, “saying that would never be OK if it was about some foreign group.” Folks who abhor ethnic stereotypes think nothing of stereotyping millions of people who lived in the past— people who, as Gabriel notes, “can’t defend themselves now.”
Complicating the picture is the fact that Victorian times are perceived as the heyday of worldwide colonialism, genocide of American Indians, and Jim Crow. Few formerly marginalized people (and their white allies) have much nostalgia for times they view as irredeemably repressive. To them, the Chrismans’ vigorous defense of their era sounds tone-deaf.
But this isn’t exactly fair. First, because not all Victorians supported the old sins, and in some cases pioneered resistance to them. Second, because few deserve to have their lives defined by the worst excesses of their times. Imagine a person from 2016 waking up in 2116, and immediately saddled with blame for Bangladeshi sweatshop labor and the flooding of southern Florida—despite the fact that they personally strove to buy American and drove a hybrid car. Indeed, the very notion that Victorian times were inherently more evil than modernity is at least debatable, and perhaps laughable. They may have had children working bobbin machines in 1880, but they didn’t fill the oceans with plastic or drop barrel bombs on civilians.
It’s unthinking and unfair, but progressivist arrogance takes its toll on the Chrismans. Sarah, who is mercurial and expressive, finds she must summon up the energy to step outside her door, even in hip, liberal Port Townsend. “It’s like running a gauntlet. I don’t know what I’ll find when I go out there.” Reactions to her hand-sewn wardrobe and corseted waist range from dewy admiration to white-hot anger—as if she is personally trying to undo a century of feminism. (She has written a book, Victorian Secrets, on what she learned wearing that half-desired, half-detested garment.) Gabriel, whose day job is in a bicycle shop, comes off as the prose to Sarah’s poetry—a mechanic and rationalist. He faces less hostility for looking different, perhaps because men’s fashions haven’t changed as much.
To a historical novelist like me, several of whose books as set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a visit to the Chrismans is a tour of Candyland. Their restored wood-burning range, with its jet-black skin and nickel warming racks, is like a polished locomotive. Sarah’s high-wheel tricycle (alas, a reproduction) has a cleverly asymmetric design—the Millennium Falcon of bikes. When seen through the Chrismans’ eyes, Victorian times don’t seem twee or repressive as much as more immediate, a place one could actually visit and learn from. If the past is a foreign country, they are ready to be your guides. May their 19th century go on forever.
© 2016 Nicholas Nicastro
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