The Victorians [Paperback]

A. N. Wilson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393325431 | ISBN-13: 978-0393325430 | Publication Date: February 2004

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

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 760 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393325431
• ISBN-13: 978-0393325430
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #394,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less might have been more!, December 31, 2002

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Victorians (Hardcover)

This book tries to be so many things at once that it ends up being none of them at all. Maybe it is simply impossible to write a coherent book about an entire century if you want to encompass all of its essentials. Every chapter here contains at least two or three themes that in themselves would warrant a book of this size (724 pages). Not to mention the characters: their number is staggering. Wilson never tires of giving us mini-biographies, but there are simply too many of them, so that it becomes impossible to keep up with them (for this reader at least). All in all the final impression is that of a vast collection of snapshots with no organizing principle to string them together other than simple chronology - and not even that is completely consistent. Coherence is not helped by Wilson's way of linking subjects, which struck me as peculiarly associative. Maybe the novelist inside got the better of him. However, it is his novelistic style of writing that makes this book pleasant to read even if it is ultimately unsatisfying. Wilson has clear opinions about the characters he describes and the events they participate in, and doesn't keep them to himself. He is not afraid to unmask the saccharine hypocrisies we still carry with us regarding the Victorians. Florence Nightingale, it turns out for instance, may have been an admirable woman, she was also as racially prejudiced as most of her contemporaries and did not allow a very well qualified black woman named Mary Seacole to work in her hospital. In the end it was Seacole though who did the really tough work at the Crimean front, while Nightingale worked at a safe distance. Queen Victoria gets some rough treatment (as well as, in passing, Elizabeth II, when Wilson states with some disdain that Victoria was 'only slightly better educated than the present monarch', which is clearly not intended as a compliment). On the other hand, Prince Albert can count on almost boundless admiration and is depicted as something not far short of a universal genius. Not only his intelligence and statesmanship are praised to the heavens, even his efforts as an amateur composer are rated very highly indeed (Wilson's opinion that the princely compositions surely outclass those of Vaughan Williams did make me wonder whether the author's acquaintance with VW's oeuvre extends anywhere beyond Greensleeves...). But all these people are in fact only minor characters on Wilson's huge canvas, where the politicians dominate the scene. If there is any red thread discernible in his book, it is the political history of the Victorian era, including its economics, colonialism and warfare. Descriptions are sketchy and, I would guess, hard to follow at times if you weren't already familiar with the basics, but the characters are described very deftly and really come off the paper. Moreover, one of the most striking assets of this book is the way in which Wilson demonstrates to what extent Victorian politics influenced our present-day reality. He also shows how lust for power, lack of vision or mere parochialism and narrow-mindedness can result in decisions that have the most gruesome consequences in the longer run: one can think of more than a few present-day politicians you would want to read these passages!
I don't know who to advise this book to. Though it is not bad, it is too garbled to be of much use to somebody unfamiliar with the Victorian era. And those who have a deeper seated interest in this epoch will probably be better off buying books that deal in greater depth with subjects that are merely touched upon here. For instance, when it comes to sociology, culture and psychology Peter Gay's excellent cycle `The Bourgeois Experience` has rather more to offer.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loved the book , but......, December 4, 2005

By 

Cynthia (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Victorians (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this book tremendously and consider it one of the treasures of my ever-growing Victorian history shelves. The only complaint (if my statement can be considered a 'true' complaint) is that the book presupposes a deeper knowledge of British history and its historical figures than most Americans (shamefully points to herself) have. I might suggest to those thinking of reading this book that they begin with a more basic overview of the times and then proceed to this volume.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This "Before" Worthy of the "After", September 7, 2007

By 

Thomas M. Sullivan (Lake George, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Victorians (Paperback)

As a committed contrarian and one who thought he had read enough about Victorian England to skip "The Victorians", I went directly to "After the Victorians" and having it enjoyed it tremendously, had to re-double and get back to the beginning, if you will. And it was worth it. As demonstrated by other reviews, it is somewhat difficult to categorize Wilson's approach to this ever-fascinating period. It's too opinionated to be "History" and too historical to be merely opinion. He calls each of these volumes a "portrait of an age", and I think that's close enough. As always, the important question is whether this or any other tome (and this IS a tome) justifies the time and effort necessary to digest it. To me, the answer is an unqualified yes. I believe what makes the book (and its successor) so enjoyable is Wilson's thorough command of his subject which in turn enables him to recount events and the lives and relationships of various personages with a sure, and frequently offbeat, hand. He knows what he's talking about and thus feels free to tell the story in his own way rather than as might be expected from a more traditional historian. And at least this reader thoroughly enjoyed "his own way".

And, by the way, if you're looking for a book on the everyday lives of the Victorians, try Judith Flanders' "Inside the Victorian Home"; terrifically well-told story by a marvelous writer.