Product Description

This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77384 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

New Statesman, February 27, 2006
Hilton has written a lively and wide-ranging study that is mercifully free of dry chronology... well worth the wait.

Review
A scrupulously complete analysis of political and social change. (Charles Saumarez Smith, The Sunday Telegraph )

History writing at its most compelling. (Adam Phillips, The Observer )

The range, richness and complexity of Boyd Hilton's text are impossible to convey in summary, and hard fully to appreciate in a single reading. A mastery of the voluminous literature is complimented by an acquaintance with the sources which produce a wealth of illuminating quotation to catch the tones and inflections of the age...The analysis it offers, and the proportions and emphases which it adopts, will galvanize debate for years to come, and make it a contribution to history such as a safer survey, less ambitious in design, enterprising in argument, and integrative in technique, could not be. (Paul Smith, The Times Literary Supplement )

The main narrative is interspersed with fascinating essays on science, religion, art, architecture and literature - a generous helping for the many people who will read this book for pleasure rather than profit. (Ben Wilson, The Spectator )

Boyd Hilton has produced a tour de force that will stimulate interest in and guide understanding of the period for years to come. (Peter Borsay, BBC History Magazine )

A lively and wide-ranging study...[a] comprehensive, intriguing and challenging volume that has proved well worth the wait. (Tristram Hunt, New Statesman )

This book, like its companion volumes, takes for its subject English society as a whole, and the Byronic nudge of the title, as well as promising entertainment, is meant to alert us to the idea that the years before the Victorian Reform Acts were ones of violence, apprehension and 18th century debauchery. (David Horspool, The Guardian )

BBC History, March 2006
'a tour de force that will stimulate interest in and guide understanding of the period for years to come'

Customer Reviews

Certainly not 'Bad', in more than a few parts 'Mad', but consistently brilliant.
I could not disagree more with the previous review. This book does not intend to be a comprehensive survey of all aspects of British history of the period - that would be impossible in one volume - but even if this book's focus is high politics and ideologies, it does devote almost 100 pages to social and economic issues.

The triumph of this book is to study political mentalities in their fullest context. What could be seen as undue attention to economic theory or romantic philosophy provides the very context from which Victorian liberalism developed, and places its heroes - Malthus, Smith, Ricardo and most importantly Burke - in direct opposition to romantics both within the Tory party and without. This is Hilton's dicotomy between the rationalist and mechanist 'liberals', epitomised by Canning, Peel and Gladstone later in the century, and the organicist Coleridgeans, with Wellington among their ranks.

This dialectic structure is analysed in all its manifestations through political culture, from developments in evolutionary theory to medieval historiography, and it is Hilton's great achievement to show how such a framework can spread across such a diverse period and dominate our views of the later Victorians. The most pasisonate and fascinating secitons of the book are the sections analysing evangelical thought, outlining its preponderance in all political and cultural life. Later figures such as Gladstone and Disraeli cannot be understood fully if their development is not placed within this context, whilst the cold, harsh liberalism attributable to the Victorian age finds personality here, and its edges are more clearly defined and understood in the context of cultural struggle. Much of this model is slightly unfashionable in high political or cultural historiography, but that does not diminish the brilliance of Hilton's analysis one bit (see his other work, particularly 'The Age of Atonement' for a more explicitly interpretative view of the period).

A must have book for all students of this period.

Sound but a little disappointing
This was in some ways a strange volume that compares oddly with other volumes of the New Oxford History of England. The series has suffered from being unsure as to whether it is designed to replace or supplement the earlier Oxford History of England. This volume is excellent on traditional political history, especially in the most limited sense of the term, which is of the formation and fall of governments. Indeed, at times it reads like a history of England written from the point of view of the Palace of Westminster. The book gives a full account of the political history of the period; of the formation of governments and of the legislation and of the intellectual thought of the period. However, it seems strangely lacking in wider analysis. The account of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is, in a book of over 600 pages covering only 63 years, for over a third of which Britain was involved in a desperate struggle for its very existence, rather slight. No one would expect a detailed survey of military history of the period; this is not the function of such a work, but a wider account of the Wars and of their impact on the nation seems called for. Equally, the volume has a heavy emphasis on the intellectual history of the period, which is both excessive and wholly out of balance with that in the rest of the Series (though it would seem very much part of the background and publishing history of the author; it may therefore be the late General Editor who ought to be criticised here). There is, I think, in a period that takes in the Industrial Revolution and the latter part of the Agricultural Revolution, more economic theory and philosophy than there is of economic history. The volume also suffers from a desire on the part of the author to draw more less (in my view less) apposite parallels between the history of the period and the politics of modern Britain. Particularly in contrast with Hoppen's magnificent volume in this series, which immediately follows this this one chronologically, this is disappointing, as it is in contrast with both Prestwich's and Harris's recently published volumes on the mediaeval period. I would strongly recommend this volume to anyone seeking an account of the political history of the period. As a wider vision of English society in this period I would not recommend it. It is I think, though a sound and highly readable work, inferior to most of the other volumes in this series.

A disappointing addition to a great series
All too many surveys of history start with soaring language that stresses how the period being examined was one of great change. Refreshingly, Boyd Hilton's contribution to the New Oxford History of England series does not do this, focusing instead on the continuities of English history from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century. While acknowledging the dramatic demographic growth of this period and the economic transformations it spawned, he argues that the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century fueled an embrace of neo-conservative ideologies that proved remarkably enduring throughout the period.

Hilton's argument shapes not just his interpretation of English history during this period, but his presentation of it as well. Arguing for a "politicization of society" during this period, he provides more political narrative than previous authors in the series have for their volumes. These chapters provide an insightful analysis of the period, particularly with regards to the political ideologies of the period. He supplements this with a superb bibliography at the end, one that offers a stimulating analysis of the historiography on the period.

Yet judged by the standard of the series, the book is something of a disappointment. The predominance of the political narratives crowds out other aspects of the era, most notably the dramatic technological changes so critical to it; these are usually addressed only in their consequences, and incompletely even then. A more persistent problem, however, is the author's presentation of historical arguments in the text. Often Hilton presents the varying interpretations of a topic or a personage with little sense as to his own opinion on the issue. While some may value the opportunity to make their own assessments, Hilton's effort at even-handedness deprives the reader of the sort of informed judgments that have made the series such a valuable tool for understanding English history.