The Victorians - Softcover

Wilson, A. N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393325431 ISBN 13: 9780393325430

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

A dramatic, revisionist panorama of an age whose material triumphs and spiritual crises prefigure our own.

The nineteenth century saw greater changes than any previous era: in the ways nations and societies were organized, in scientific knowledge, and in nonreligious intellectual development. The crucial players in this drama were the British, who invented both capitalism and imperialism and were incomparably the richest, most important investors in the developing world. In this sense, England's position has strong resemblances to America's in the late twentieth century.

As one of our most accomplished biographers and novelists, A. N. Wilson has a keen eye for a good story, and in this spectacular work he singles out those writers, statesmen, scientists, philosophers, and soldiers whose lives illuminate so grand and revolutionary a history: Darwin, Marx, Gladstone, Christina Rossetti, Gordon, Cardinal Newman, George Eliot, Kipling. Wilson's accomplishment in this book is to explain through these signature lives how Victorian England started a revolution that still hasn't ended. 65 illustrations

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A.N. Wilson does for the Victorians what Peter Ackroyd did for London.

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in this superb portrait of the Victorians in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story. In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A.N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

The industrial-capitalist world came into being because of actual businessmen, journalists and politicians. We meet them in the pages of this fascinating book. Their ideas were challenged by the ideas of other people, such as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. Here are the lofty and the famous -- Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli -- and here too are the poor and the obscure -- doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa. In this authoritative, accessible and insightful book, A.N. Wilson tells a great story -- one that is still unfinished in our own day.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author:

A. N. Wilson is the author of the acclaimed biographies Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Jesus, and Paul; God's Funeral, and several celebrated novels. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0393325431
• ISBN 13: 9780393325430
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 738