The Victorians - Hardcover

Wilson, A. N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393049744 ISBN 13: 9780393049749

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2003

Synopsis

A revisionist panorama of the nineteenth century examines the era's material and spiritual changes in the wake of emerging British capitalism and imperialism, as told through the writings of such figures as Darwin, Marks, George Eliot, and Kipling. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

A. N. Wilson lives in London.

Reviews

"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.

Wilson will need all his skills as a biographer and novelist to encompass an era that included Darwin, Marx, and George Eliot.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

According to the author, Victorian philosophers, scientists, economists, entrepreneurs, and politicians ushered in an era of rapid and unprecedented change. Twentieth and twenty-first century sensibilities were shaped and foreshadowed by a daring group of radical thinkers who belie the common notion that nineteenth-century Britons were, for the most part, staid and conservative thinkers and workers. Attempting to paint a "portrait of an age" that transformed the world and spawned an increasingly global point-of-view, Wilson provides a decade-by-decade overview of the Victorian era, animating those men and women whose actions and ideas helped define and characterize one of the most innovative and influential ages in history. Wilson's background as a biographer and a novelist enables him to vividly capture and communicate the texture and the flavor of Victorian Britain. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393049744
• ISBN 13: 9780393049749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544