The Victorians - Softcover

Wilson, A. N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099451867 ISBN 13: 9780099451860

Publisher: Arrow, 2003

Synopsis

We live in a world the Victorians created. Their two great inventions go hand-in-hand: industrial capitalism and imperialism. A.N. Wilson illuminates these two great facts, not in ideological terms but in personal terms, 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 about because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, and actual politicians. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw — here they are. Here are the lofty and famous — 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.

A.N. Wilson’s book is a mosaic in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story — a story still unfinished to this day.

About this title

About the Author:

A.N. Wilson holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist.

From Publishers Weekly:

"There will always be an England" ran one of the New Yorker's fabled lines. And there will always be writers-and readers-besotted with the Victorians. Wilson, biographer of John Milton and C.S. Lewis and author of many other works, provides a pastiche of the Victorian age. The 43 chapters are notably brief; the five parts move chronologically through the decades from the 1830s to the 1890s. Individual topics cover the spectrum of life in 19th-century Britain, including high politics and astounding economic progress. Wilson offers vivid sketches of John Ruskin, Robert Browning and many other cultural luminaries. Yet Wilson is, thankfully, not pollyannaish: he depicts the wrenching conditions that industrialization foisted upon the common people and marshals an array of stories that shatter the image of a benign, civilizing colonialism. The many anecdotes about Victorians famous and obscure will delight many readers, but Wilson's book is long on stories and short on explanation. Those with little background in British history will be confused by the parade of people who come and go, and by events that are mentioned but not described. Specialists, on the other hand, will be annoyed by many of the author's judgments, such as the strange comparison of Marx and Hitler and the claim that "there is an inexorability about events and their consequences." Wilson's book has its enjoyable moments, but readers will be better off opening any one of the volumes in Peter Gay's magisterial series, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud. 32 pages of illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099451867
• ISBN 13: 9780099451860
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 738