Customer Reviews

The Victorians

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A. N. Wilson's career and writing have earned him, according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, the "reputation as an acerbic and provocatively conservative critic and [as] an oft-quoted example of 'fogeydom' because of his traditional values and his High Church sympathies." (Indeed, the word 'fogey' appears so often in the British press alongside Wilson's name that they have nearly become synonyms.) In one sense, then, rarely has a topic found a more apt chronicler. Conversely, I approached this book with more than a little trepidation, concerned that, in the manner of Jacques Barzun, Wilson would reflect on the nineteenth century and approvingly and longingly recount the "good old days."

I needn't have worried. While Wilson's history is certainly traditional in its telling, his tone is persistently skeptical, his judgment is stern, and his sensibilities--on race, on sex, on religion, on class--are firmly entrenched in the 21st century. (So much so that Gertrude Himmelfarb, the closest thing we Americans have to a fogey, panned the book in the pages of the Atlantic.) He remains enamored of its successes and legacy, yet he is clearly repulsed by its excesses and chauvinism.

"The Victorians" isn't an introductory survey. Wilson assumes his (British) audience has heard of Gladstone and Parnell, read a little of John Ruskin, and knows when and where the Boer War occurred. If the name of Sir Robert Peel means nothing to you, then you will be lost from the opening pages.

Instead, Wilson has crafted a review of his studies of the century, filled with delightful (and often humorous) anecdotes laced with opinionated assessments and revisionist implications. And, unlike similar topical histories, Wilson's book reads in parts like a novel (or, more accurately, a series of thematically linked stories); at times I found it difficult to put down. From his deconstruction of the myth of the "martyrdom" of General Charles George Gordon at the hands of African natives to a deft analysis of popular music-hall entertainment, from the aristocracy and the monarchy to dockworkers, child laborers, and victims of colonialism--his book leaves few aspects of the era untouched.

Even when I disagreed with his conclusions, I enjoyed Wilson's engaging wit and (yes) old-fashioned stories too much to care. By the time I finished this immense book, I understood that his opening sentence--"The Victorians are still with us"--was offered dubiously, perhaps even ominously, but certainly not nostalgically.

A. N. Wilson's "The Victorians" is a beautiful book -- heavy, substantial, well-designed, made with smooth and expensive paper, and containing four sets of terrific photographs, many in unexpectedly bold color -- and a pleasure to read in the physical sense. The pleasures to be found by reading the words on the pages, while not as great, are not insubstantial. Wilson assumes that the reader begins the book prepossessed of an intimate knowledge of Victorian people, places, trends, art, literature, schools of thought, religious sects, and events, as well as other post-Victorian studies (such as Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians"). Wilson does not start at the beginning, regardless of subject; he just dives right in, and nowhere does he hide his leftist attitude and approach to the telling of history. The writing, though, is exquisite, and makes the book worthwhile if the reader happens already to know a lot about English history from 1837 (the year of Victoria's ascension to the throne) to her death in 1901, or if the reader merely enjoys brilliant, provocative prose and does not insist upon knowing precisely what the author is talking about at any given moment. Although occasionally frustrating, there are enough stunning paragraphs that compel the reader to finish the book, lest he miss one of them. Towards the end, Wilson's attention and interest seem to wander; in a chapter purportedly devoted to the Boer War, fought just before Victoria's 64-year reign came to an end, Wilson instead writes about the (he says) homosexual and pedophilic predilections of many noted English imperialists -- Cecil Rhodes, Lord Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts), and Lord Kitchener. Wilson writes, "It would be very easy to make sense of the Imperialists if we could attribute the whole phenomenon of the British Empire to repression of, or failure to understand, sexuality." "Very easy"? I'm no expert, but that seems like a stretch to me. Wilson goes on: "How nearly one could argue that the careers of Rhodes, Kitchener, Baden-Powell and many another manly, knobbly-kneed son of Empire reached their zenith at the very moment [Oscar] Wilde confronted his nemesis." This is, of course, highly amusing, if incomprehensible (I have no idea what "How nearly one could argue" means) and historically suspect. I imagine, though, that Wilson is merely rewarding the reader for plodding through 600 pages of dense prose. There are many such rewards in this excellent (though flawed) book.

Wilson's book is best taken in small doses, rather like his articles in London's Daily Telegraph. The book is a huge panoramic survey of the years of Victoria's reign (1837-1901). It is mainly chronological and organized around large themes such as art, novelists, poetry, the Empire, politics, social mores. It is a bit of curate's egg (partly good, partly bad). The actual curate's egg cartoon was published in Punch on 9 November 1895, and so the reference is also apposite. The good part is the flavor Wilson brings to the dry facts. He is full of wonderful anecdotes about characters and episodes, usually in parentheticals, which really liven up the broth. He does have an encyclopedic knowledge of victoriana and is not afraid to ladle it out. The bad part is the fact that it is simply not possible to give a coherent semblance of Victorian Britain in just one book, even a thick one. All but the most central characters (like Gladstone or Disraeli) merit at most a couple of pages, and there are so many of them it's hard to keep them all straight, even when one is familiar with the subject. This gives the book a more than passing resemblance to a telephone directory, where one is introduced to a cast a hundreds (or thousands), but few stick in one's mind. Perhaps Wilson should have tried a device such as depicting events around the main members of two significant families, such as Figes did in his great "Natasha's Dance", which allowed him to cover three hundred years of Russian cultural history with a certain modicum of coherence lacking in Wilson's book. Absent a clear organizing scheme, the book is a bit chaotic and not an easy read unless taken in small bites.

Having said this, I enjoyed Wilson's retakes of some personages who were absolutely thrashed by Lytton Strachey in his delightfully bitchy "Eminent Victorians". I particularly liked seeing the mercurial Cardinal Manning shown as an intelligent, visionary man (he was fully aware that the future of the Church lay in supporting democratic politics and taking the side of the poor, and he did it himself by promoting trade unionism and Irish home rule) rather than as the nasty careerist Strachey describes. In all likelihood both Wilson and Strachey are partly correct in their descriptions of the Cardinal, but Wilson's view is more sympathetic.

I didn't much like Wilson's constant apologies about the racial attitudes of the Victorians. Those views were of their time, and there's no need to keep harping on it. Anachronistic smugness is a bit jarring. Moreover, I believe he should have been stronger in his defense of the positive side of the Empire, which was a greatly civilizing force, and the precedent for the current international law system. The British Victorians, instead of merely expoliating the natives (like the Dutch or the Belgians) did work for their betterment. Men like Messieurs Nehru and Mandela may only be seen as the rightful heirs to the best side of both the native and colonial inheritances.

I would have given this book 3 1/2 stars, but the option is not available.

"I have been looking for God for 50 years," Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy observed, "and I think that if he existed I should have discovered him" (p. 431. Hardy's sentiment permeates A. N. Wilson's examination of Victorian England. In his illuminating "portrait of an age" (p. 4), Wilson, biographer of Milton and C. S. Lewis, demonstrates that the Victorian era was not only an age of Dickensian paupers, famine, inefficiency and disease, it was also a time of spiritual hunger and intellectual revolution. In the introductory sentences of his book, Wilson declares that "theirs was the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world" (p. 1), and then competently proves his point through a series of biographical and historical sketches.

Wilson's study of the Victorians begins with the October 16, 1834 fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster and concludes, as one might expect, with the January 22, 1901 death of Queen Victoria clutching her crucifix. Along the way, he perhaps too briefly examines the artistic, political, scientific and philosophical contributions of Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dodgson (ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND), George Eliot, William Gladstone, Hardy (a writer, Wilson observes, who captured deep truths about the nature of his times, p. 431), Charles Kingsley, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Sir Robert Peel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Robert Browning, Lord Palmerston, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Wordsworth to their Victorian culture. Wilson's study of the Victorians, however, fails to offer anything new, which is disappointing. THE VICTORIANS nevertheless paints a fascinating and nearly picture-perfect portrait of the age.

G. Merritt

The full panoply of the Victorian Age is put on display in this essential book: royalty idiotic and benign, doubting divines, philosophers materialistic and otherwise, artists, authors, politicians and aristocrats, all supported by a working class (and farmers) who toiled and, surprisingly to followers of the sorry tale of revolutionary socialism on the continent, did not rise in revolt. Why this did not happen, pace previous reviewers on this site, makes for a fascinating story.

Wilson explains this paradox in a tour de force of historical writing that should satisfy historians of quantity as well as the heirs of Gibbon who make of history an elegant art. Wilson's schematic is to break up the era into chronological decades each of which is dominated by the salient issues/personalities. N.B. you will need at least to have heard of some of these people and issues as Wilson has neither space nor inclination to explain everyone and everything to the uninitiated. For example, the eternal duet of Disraeli and Gladstone are limned by the reflections of the era; you are expected to know something of whence they came. The same holds for personalities as diverse as Darwin and Wilde and issues as wide-ranging as the Reform Bills and Mesmerism. Peter Gay may have delved deeper, but what one-volume history could? Even Gibbon could have used some judicious editing as with his unedifying chronicle of the endless quarrels of the Alexandrine Church.

Wilson is nothing if not even-handed. Even so, he gives us such gems as: "Gladstone's earnest desire to improve the human race made him popular with Nonconformist Northern grocers". Indeed. As another example Wilson puts paid once and for all to the reputation of Pius IX while also making a convincing case for the greatness of Cardinal Manning (the historically omnipresent Cardinal Newman suffers in comparison).

The book's treatment of the horrible working and living conditions of the industrial workers, Irish peasants and the poorer denizens of the large cities should serve as a corrective to those who think of Victorian life as something reflected on Quality Street candy tins. Marx may have been perplexed by the failure of all this misery to lead to revolution but, despite earlier critics, Wilson gives, to my mind, a rational explanation of why the the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, for example, concentrated the minds of the 'lower' classes more than quotidian miseries.

Beginning in 1834 with the burning of the Houses of Parliament and ending with the dead Queen Victoria floating past warships of many nations in 1901, judicious readers of this book will be astounded by the breadth of Wilson's learning. Enjoy this book for what it is: a discursive, sometimes idiosyncratic, always entertaining look at an era that reverberates to this day.

Some reviewers are offended by books in which the author vents his opinions. Why is this? A reader should be offended if an author tries to present his biases as truth, but when Mr. Wilson gives an opinion you know in no uncertain terms that it is an opinion. That, from my viewpoint, is what makes this book an entertaining read. I think that Henry James and Oscar Wilde were talented authors, but Wilson trashes them, and I laughed reading his scornful commentary on those two. He jumps all over the aristocracy and the politicians (most often the aristocrat is also the politician), and they deserve what they get. When Prince Albert dies Wilson opines that the only intellectual light bulb in the royal family has now been extinguished.

I should point out that this book is actually the second of A.N. Wilson's history of the Victorian era. The first book, God's Cathedral, was more of an intellectual history that, among other things, explored the waning of religion in Britain. Actually I found it to be the more interesting of the two books, but then I am more intrigued by intellectual history than by political history which is the topic of The Victorians.

Indeed there is a bit of a problem with this book. Someone wanders into the book, stays a few paragraphs, and quickly vanishes without a trace. My point of view, however, is that the value of this book is to create a vivid portrait of the Victorian era. In the long run it is not that important that you remember who was Prime Minister in 1866 (Russell). What you do take away from this book is how the aristocracy ruled Britain without any concern for the well being of its people. It is amazing to read that members of parliament stood up to virtuously denounce the slave trade while small children were working 12 hours a day in British coal mines. And how proud everyone was of the higher civilization that was being brought to the inferior peoples of India. And the neglect which followed the potato famine in Ireland. And the laws that treated women as chattel. Then, too, there is the tremendous support given to Britain's foreign wars by the general populace. They seemed to view them all as romantic adventures, including the Boer war where the Brits put 117,000 Boers in concentration camps (mostly women and children). Twenty thousand died there, mostly children.

Over the long years of Queen Victoria's reign there was change. Those millions of common people who struggled to make a living began to unite, and their voices and actions were slowly but surely heard. In the final years of the century the aristocrats went into decline, ruined by estate taxes, low land rents, agricultural depression, and income taxes. Read this book and be prepared to get a broad view of the Victorian era. You won't be tested on the material, so don't get perturbed if you can't remember all the names and dates. When I finished the book I felt that I had gotten the picture that Wilson tried to paint. Hey if you really want to study some serious, non opinionated, Victorian history you can always read the three volumes of the New Oxford History of England (about 2600 pages) that deal with this historical period.

It should also be mentioned that at the end of the book Mr. Wilson notes that the downtrodden poor were in no worse condition than they would be if they had lived in most other countries. And the many who spoke out against injustice were free to do so whereas such dissent would not be tolerated in many countries.

Even those who know the Victorian period well will still derive, I think, much pleasure from reading this elegantly written book. Some readers may find Wilson's personality somewhat obtrusive: he is consistently judgmental, never fails to comment with indignation on the cruelties and injustices Victorian society, frequently brings out similarities and differences between those days and our own, is often fashionably ironic about the period, and on many occasions is idiosyncratic about the aspects on which he focuses. But he also does justice to Victorian virtues and above all to the many-sidedness of the age. The width of his reading in history and literature is formidable. He certainly brings the period and its personalities to life; the main political events of the century are covered well; and he is never boring.