Product Description

We live in the world which the Victorians created. The global village is Victorian village. Their two great inventions go hand in hand: industrial capitalism, and imperialism. Historians in the past have tended to describe these two great facts in ideological, rather than in personal terms. A.N. Wilson illuminates them through the people who built them. In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age, he describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being. The capitalist world came into being because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, actual politicians. We meet them in the pages of this book. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw - here they are. Here are also the lofty and famous - Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli - and here too are the poor and the obscure - doctors ministering to cholera victims, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes. A.N. Wilson's book is a mosaic, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59169 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 738 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
AN Wilson’s The Victorians is the longest and liveliest of the books which have appeared in the wake of the centenary of Victoria’s death. As one might expect, Wilson, Evening Standard columnist, novelist, and polemical biographer, has an eye for colourful detail, cannot resist gossip about the great and good, and smells out cant and hypocrisy at 10 paces. Familiar tales are told about the sexual proclivities, religious hypocrisies and gargantuan economic and imperial appetites of the Victorians. But the book is more than an exercise in debunking. Wilson sees 19th century Britons as the harbingers of modernity: the first society to grapple with and agonise over the Darwinian struggle of social mobility and industrial growth. He documents in detail the relentless drive for getting on, sympathises with its victims--in the English towns, the Irish bogs and on the Indian plains – and warms to the critical commentary of the chief sages and seers of the era: Carlyle, Dickens, and Manning. The intellectual set-pieces of the time--the Gothic revival, religion versus science, Anglo-Catholicism--are particularly well-handled.

As well as being its strengths, the author’s prejudices are at times the book’s weaknesses. Apart from Victoria’s Prime Ministers and the Irish nationalist leader, Parnell, Wilson doesn’t much like the politicians of the period (or the political economists), and these aspects of Victorian history get rather short shrift. And the narrative occasionally jumps and jars as he tries to include everything and anything (Dostoyevsky and Wagner wander in at one stage). But there is much to amuse and instruct throughout, and, just as important, not a little to argue with as well.--Miles Taylor

Review
'Rarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force' Robert McCrum, 'Books of the Year', Observer

Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian, August 31, 2002
'... The Victorians is a magnificent achievement: plucky, engaged and full of awe at the way we continue to live out its inheritance today.'

Customer Reviews

Overly political but eminently readable
A hefty book (620 pp), densely and fluently written and eminently readable. I liked the fact that Wilson's own opinions come through strongly. There are some fascinating nuggets here, some which make you laugh aloud, as in this gem from an American correspondent on the Boer War:
"To call the Boer forces an army was to add unwarranted elasticity to the word......[they] fought with guns and gunpowder but had no discipline, no drills, no forms, no standards and not even a roll call". Wilson adds that
'when one field cornet of the Kroonstad commando insisted on holding a morning roll call and rifle inspection, the men complained to a higher authority and he was told to stop harassing them'.

However, for my own taste there was far too much emphasis on politics and the political wrangling of the Church (or churches - High, Low, Broad, Puseyites etc) to the detriment of the social history, although given Wilson's fascination with the Church and his previous novels I suppose this is not surprising. I could also have done with detailed footnotes rather than just reference numbers to the bibliography, although I appreciate this would have made the book even longer.

Although more like a collection of essays in which Wilson rambles with many sidetracks and deviations over his huge subject, overall I enjoyed it and will doubtless re-read it in time.

A useful overview of a long period in history
Not only was Victoria's reign long but it was also chock-full of events, making the era quite a dense one to get to grips with. This is what makes Wilson's text such an enjoyable read: he organises the period both chronologically and thematically so that it can be dealt with in manageable sections, compartmentalising the era while ensuring there are cohesive links to show the development of issues and ideas as the period progressed. Furthermore, his use of biography to illustrate his analysis of the Victorians and Victorianism means that his theories, as well as the concerns of the era, are personalised and made much more vivid for it. I would have given five stars but I found all the explorations of military history a little dry and felt that Wilson was rather obsessed with Cardinal Manning and that, interesting though the man was, this used up valuable space in a text that is very long and meaty. I am sure that even people who have studied the period inside out will find something new in this book and there are lots of engaging and amusing tidbits, including some fantastic gossip-mongering, too.

The Curate's Egg
A.N Wilson, industrious polymath, has delivered a detailed history of the Victorian era. The scope is huge: we have chapters on the rise of the private school, spiritualism, the Pre-Raphaelites and the potato famine, to name a few. As a bonus, Wilson's prose remains lively, engaging and conversational throughout.

At his best, Wilson erects welcome barriers to simplistic interpretations of Victorian ways and events always stressing that people and policies are best and most fairly assessed when viewed within their proper historical context and not from a more `enlightened' modern standpoint.

At his worst, his book often reduces to a lifeless list of minor characters brought to the stage too briefly to provide a broad enough picture of the age - we are regularly overwhelmed with minor biographical details to the detriment of constructive analysis of the topic discussed. This is in stark contrast to the highly successful `Empire' by Niall Ferguson which covers some of the same themes in a more scholarly and consistent manner.

So Wilson's foray into Victorian history is rather like the fabled egg; good in parts but flawed in others.