New research in the journal Intelligence suggests the Victorians were naturally cleverer than we are, and draws the startling conclusion that "the Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently". Psychologists have studied reaction times – apparently an indicator of intelligence – from the 1880s to the present, and discovered that they are slowing. Other factors such as health and diet mean overall intelligence is increasing, but the researchers insist our genetic IQ is in decline, a trend they attribute to clever people having fewer children than – how can this be put diplomatically? – less clever people.
Leaving aside methodological questions and the dangerously eugenicist avenues down which such findings might lead, the report will give a boost to those who seek to deify the Victorians. AA Gill recognised this tendency in a recent column in the Sunday Times. "The three greatest about-face rehabilitations in my lifetime have been Germany, Bruce Forsyth and the Victorians," he wrote. "I was brought up by a generation that roundly and implacably loathed the Victorians. To call someone a Victorian was the most dismissive insult: it made them irrelevant … Yet now they're everywhere, like top-hatted zombies risen from the opprobrium: Victorian food, Victorian design, Victorian engineering and masses of reimagined Victorian values."
AN Wilson started the fightback with his well-received 2002 book The Victorians; Jeremy Paxman took it further in 2009 with a book that had an admirable stab at the apparently impossible task of resurrecting Victorian painting; and now education secretary Michael Gove is insisting we read Middlemarch rather than the Twilight novels. "Stephenie Meyer cannot hold a flaming pitch torch to George Eliot," he said last week. "There is a great tradition of English literature – a canon of transcendent works – and Breaking Dawn is not part of it."
The renaissance came after a century in which the Victorians had been largely derided. Following the publication in 1918 of Lytton Strachey's book Eminent Victorians, which set out to demythologise 19th-century heroes such as General Gordon and Florence Nightingale, Victoriana became synonymous with hypocrisy, aesthetic dullness and a philosophy of might is right. In Strachey's view, the origins of the first world war could be traced back to the Victorians' power hunger.
Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Just as the researchers on Intelligence celebrate the Victorians' unique capacity for innovation, so in the Olympic opening ceremony Danny Boyle gave the touchstone opening speech from The Tempest – "Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises" – to Kenneth Branagh, playing the top-hatted Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Caliban's dream sat oddly with the nightmare vision summoned up in the Pandemonium section of the ceremony, but Boyle insisted the disjunction was deliberate. The industrial revolution was hellish, but it unleashed forces that in the long run were beneficial – political democracy, educational opportunity, greater social mobility, better healthcare.
We have come to revere the Victorians because they were on the cusp of that change. They had to contend with the social breakdown induced by the industrial revolution – in the 1840s Marx and Engels were convinced Britain was on the verge of a corresponding political revolution, so appalling were the conditions in which the working class lived – and managed within a generation to produce a society that not just functioned but became the powerhouse of the world.
Whereas Strachey despised the commercial and political might the industrial revolution made possible, current observers look at our own sclerotic polity and contrast it with the Victorians' towering ambitions. When they write about the Victorians, what Strachey and the present-day panegyrists are really writing about is their own society. Strachey wanted a new postwar world founded on the values of Bloomsbury; Gove and his fellow Tories – Margaret Thatcher was always keen on espousing "Victorian values" – venerate Victoriana because they seek to denigrate the way we live now.
The banal truth is that, as with every age, the Victorian period was a mix of greatness and littleness. Empire was an epic adventure but also, at its heart, wretched and racist. Society was transformed, the economy boomed, cities grew rapidly, but at the same time women were oppressed, poverty was widespread, education rudimentary. Great novels mapped these changes and iniquities, but drama was moribund and, with the exception of Tennyson, poetry saw a sorry falling off after the glories of the 18th century. We should seek neither to dismiss nor to deify the Victorians; rather we should engage in the more difficult task of trying to understand them, and to understand, too, why our view of them has shifted so dramatically in the past decade. If we are clever enough, of course.
• This article was amended on 15 May 2013. An editing error led to Stephenie Meyer's first name being misspelled as Stephanie on publication. This has now been corrected.
