Customer Reviews

Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times

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For someone in search of a coherent, cohesive social history of 19th century Britain, this volume is a considerable disappointment. Pritchard, a lecturer in literature, has brought together a large number of very brief excerpts from a very wide variety of publications from the 1830s through about the 1870s. (The last twenty years of Victoria's reign were increasingly different from the first forty years, as even observers at the time recognized.) These are grouped in only the most general way under eight broad topics, including ladies and gentlemen, education and religion, the working class, country life, and so on. Within each chapter, the reader will find an except from one of Dickens's novels, followed by an article from a newspaper, followed by a paragraph or two by Hippolyte Taine (the noted French traveler and commentator), followed by an excerpt from Hardy or Trollope, followed by a comment by Henry Mayhew, followed by a selection from a Church of England sermon by someone I've never heard of. And this odds-and-sods approach continues throughout the book. There is no contextual commentary to tell you why it's useful to read any of this. There are no conclusions drawn. Illustrations are scattered throughout but it's not always obvious how they relate to the subject apparently under discussion. The index includes only authors quoted and the titles of their works -- no subjects. And the two-page "Further Reading" list includes only modern secondary sources (and omits many of the best of them). There are much better works than this on the market on the subject of "Victorian life."