A Victorian Escape

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Pax est melior quam bellum — Peace is better than war

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I lost myself in the Victorian era last week, reading Beth Brower's delightful series The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion (books 1-8) before bed and watching "Young Sherlock" on Prime whenever I could steal the time. The Latin quote above comes from one of Emma's journals, a simple declaration that echoes with particular force against the backdrop of today's headlines.

Were Victorian times simpler? Not for women. They couldn't own property until 1870, and even then couldn't keep property from before marriage until 1882. Brower's Emma—first encountered in 1883—chafes under society's mandate that she engage a chaperone. When she turns twenty-one and comes into her inheritance, she discovers a distant male relative has drained most of her scant funds. Of course he had access—he was male.

In "Young Sherlock," the protagonist's mother has been drugged and declared insane after losing a child, allowing the father to claim the deed and estate to salvage his failing businesses. Mrs. Holmes—locked in an asylum for twelve years—emerges wholly sane and blazing with righteous rage, freed by sons who learned dubious lessons about treating women from their manipulative father.

The Victorian era was no golden age. Women remained dependent on husbands for stability, reputation, and survival. Brower's beautiful books introduce strong females who buck that tide and stand on their own feet, while depicting the enormous struggle such independence required compared to male counterparts. Yet if one was fortunate enough to possess funds and education, there existed a longing for scholarship—for reading and writing and conversing with friends over intellectual pursuits. We allow ourselves to be robbed of such goals and habits now, distracted by endless scrolling and manufactured urgency.

Though "Young Sherlock" contains fighting over government weapons, violence and espionage, the destruction feels manageable compared to what we witness in today's wars. The Latin quote surfaces each time I read the headlines and recoil from the devastation we inflict on innocents from hundreds of miles away. We don't fight hand to hand anymore, but from joystick and screen to target on the ground—sanitized violence that I suppose makes it easier to unleash.

Pax est melior quam bellum. Peace is better than war. I don't wish to return to the Victorian era with its corsets and constraints, its cruelty to women and rigid hierarchies. But for one week, it offered a refuge—a place to hide while the world outside grows increasingly unrecognizable, increasingly brutal. Sometimes we need these escapes, these reminders that humans have always struggled toward something better, even when better feels impossibly far away.