Inventing the Victorians Matthew Sweet Faber and Faber, 304pp, £16.99 ISBN 0571206581

In this puzzling book, Matthew Sweet sets out to show that the Victorians were not the prissy, plodding stick-in-the-muds we like to believe. Rather, he argues, they were friskily go-ahead, sleeping with whomever they felt like, zapping electronic communications around the world, and putting a spin on every difficult story that came out of Westminster. Yes, that's right, they were just like us.

But who is "us"? The central problem of Sweet's book is his hopeless muddle about whom he is addressing. There can be very few intelligent and educated people - and this is a Faber book, after all - who still think that the Victorians were proto-Thatcherites wedded to a single set of repressive "values" that they insisted on inflicting on all and sundry. Over the past 20 years, the work of academics such as Raphael Samuel, John Tosh, Peter Gay and a whole army of others has been dedicated to introducing light, shade, complication and subtlety to the way we think about 65 years of British social history. The odd thing is that Sweet, who is a journalist, knows about this work - indeed, he relies on it heavily - yet still manages to suggest, by using the boldly possessive "I think", that he has come up with some kind of radical revisionism all on his own.

Much of the material on which Sweet rests his argument has been used before, not just by professional historians, but by the exploding number of television producers currently scrabbling around for suitable subjects to turn into one-hour historical documentaries for Channel 4 and BBC2. Thus the chapter on the tabloid press, designed to demonstrate that it was not us but the Victorians who came up with the idea of the popular sex scandal, rests almost entirely on one particular case history, the wearisome "Maiden Tribute of Babylon" episode. This tangled tale of compromised investigative journalism (in 1885, the campaigning editor W T Stead tried to buy an under-age girl for sex in order to demonstrate the flourishing state of the white slave trade to readers of the Pall Mall Gazette) has been told before, and told better by Judith Walkowitz in City of Dreadful Delight (1992). Although Sweet acknowledges his debt to Walkowitz in a footnote, he bafflingly waits until a completely different chapter - on serial killers - before introducing her name into the main body of his text.

Sweet's methodology, which is to grab examples of apparently un-Victorian Victorians without worrying too much about detail or context, leads him to make some pretty strange (and sometimes completely wrong) assertions. He pays a huge amount of attention to sex, which is probably to be expected, but manages to muddle the crucial details. As evidence that not all Victorians were locked into dreary marital monogamy, he cites John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, claiming that they cohabited for a decade until the death of Taylor's husband allowed them to get married. In reality, the couple never lived together, and may never have consummated what was undoubtedly a very powerful, if anguished, love. Likewise, Sweet suggests that the way Mary Ann Evans (whom he never clarifies as being the novelist George Eliot, presumably because he assumes his readers will be sufficiently clued-up about the 19th century to know this already) and George Henry Lewes cohabited for 25 years is evidence that the Victorians were goers. In fact, Evans's decision to live with Lewes caused both of them excruciating unhappiness, and resulted in her exclusion from the normal social life of literary London for at least a decade. If anything, Evans's experience is evidence of just how harshly even the most progressive-seeming mid-Victorians reacted to female sexual transgression.

If Sweet is casual about the variegated nature of Victorian experience, he is even more cavalier about the life and times of moderns. When he comes across those who are attached to versions of the 19th century that do not accord with his own, he dismisses them, with a sneer, as old, stupid, provincial and Conservative (quite definitely with a large "C"). In one particularly uncomfortable passage, he pokes fun at the annual Victorian festival in Llandrindod Wells, Powys, which he sees as a kind of delusional homage to a fantasy of a safe and pretty past. To a certain extent, he has a point: some of what goes on in Llandrindod every August is nonsense. But for those who look carefully and bother to listen properly, there is a wealth of specialist knowledge among the visiting speakers and the long-time inhabitants, not about some monolithic "Victorian" experience, but about the very particular phenomenon of late 19th-century spa-town culture in English-speaking Wales.

It is this inability to break up "Victorian" into a multitude of contradictory and overlapping strands (despite all his talk about Foucault and discourse analysis, Sweet never quite gets it) that does everyone a disservice.

The Victorians emerge as a bunch of circus-freakish, opium-addicted shagging machines, while "we" - that is, everyone contemporary with Sweet who doesn't agree with him - are credulous fools who think that sending children up chimneys was probably a reasonable price to pay for all that lovely law and order. Also made to look stupid are a bunch of people known simply as "academics", obsessive feminist social historians who bang on about clitoridectomies with very little evidence that the Victorians in reality carried them out. Quite honestly, it is all a bit more complicated than that.

Kathryn Hughes's George Eliot: the last Victorian (Fourth Estate, £8.99) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She is working on a biography of Mrs Beeton

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