Victorian Values

The telephone, the telegraph, the railroad, the transatlantic cable, the light bulb, the radio, the phonograph, the motion pictures, the techniques of mass production—almost all the great technological changes associated with the twentieth century are, in fact, American Victorian inventions. "This city is composed of their value patterns," Robert Pirsig writes.

It was their optimism, their belief in the future, their codes of craftsmanship and labor and thrift and self-discipline that really built twentieth-century America. The Victorians were extraordinarily creative precisely because of these values, not in spite of them. "Since the Victorians disappeared," Pirsig observes, "the entire drift of this century has been toward a dissipation of these values." The irony is striking: we live in the world they built, surrounded by the fruits of their disciplined creativity, while having largely abandoned the very principles that made such creation possible.