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After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World by A. N. Wilson  (12)

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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.

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.

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First Sentence:
On 16 October 1834, two visitors arrived at the Palace of Westminster and asked to be shown the chamber of the House of Lords. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
parliamentary time Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Queen Victoria, Lord Salisbury, Crimean War, Prince Albert, Corn Laws, Home Rule, House of Commons, Lloyd George, Lord John Russell, Church of England, Liberal Party, Lord Palmerston, Victorian England, East India Company, John Stuart Mill, Prince of Wales, Roman Catholic, Labour Party, British Empire, South Africa, Great Britain, Reform Bill, George Eliot, Sir Robert Peel, Annie Besant New!
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