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High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain Hardcover – January 1, 2013

by Simon Heffer (Author)

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Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind.
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people - politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers - who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society.
Simon Heffer's first major new book since the success of Strictly English explores this process of transformation, and will delight readers of similar titles such as A. N. Wilson's The Victorians. It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people - and how our forebears' pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

Print length

896 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Books
Publication date

January 1, 2013
Dimensions

6.38 x 2.09 x 9.45 inches
ISBN-10

1847946771
ISBN-13

978-1847946775
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Books; First Edition (January 1, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 896 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847946771
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847946775
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.73 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 2.09 x 9.45 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,041,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews:
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4.4 out of 5

151 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Great author !!! On time and on budget.

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2022

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Read before the author's "Age of Decadence"

2 people found this helpful

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Walter Lemann

Outstanding and fascinating study

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2018

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A deep, serious examination of this period. Though lengthy, it was so readable I couldn’t put it down. His portraits, in particular, breathe life into even the dullest Victorians.

7 people found this helpful

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Replicant

Like the curate's egg

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2021

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Heffer knows a lot, has a good fluid style, and is capable of structuring narratives well. He is especially good at biography. For me most of the charm of the book was the sympathetic treatment of minor figures, people you would otherwise never hear about. So if you are interested in the period buy the book, because you'll surely find something useful in it.

That said, this is a frustrating and undisciplined production. Within its 800-odd pages are several possible books. There is the political story of reform, told in a number of vivid and well-paced chapters. It is, to be sure, colored by Heffer’s politics and limited by inattention to the Irish question, but he does a good job bringing out some of the drama and contingency of the time. Heffer's biographical talents find good use here. And in those chapters he makes an effort to do the historian’s job of giving you the relevant context and main players.

Then there is a rather different book about the decline of Anglican faith and authority among a small group of elite intellectuals. Here context suffers and partiality rules. Newman is treated as a villain and the Oxford movement as a deplorable cult. Catholics hardly exist. Methodists and other dissenting churches are off the map. But even for a focus on Anglicanism, attention is spotty. The Colenso and _Essays and Reviews_ controversies go unmentioned. Anglican evangelicals get almost no attention. And while he starts the book loudly abusing Lytton Strachey and pointedly rehabilitating Dr. Arnold, at the end of the day Heffer is not that different from Strachey. His heart is with the doubting sons of abusive clerics.

It would be idle to tot up omissions, but especially glaring is the total inattention to Herbert Spencer who, though now unread, was one of the dominant public intellectuals of the mid-to-late 19th century. Heffer fails, for example, to note on page 221 that it was Spencer who got “survival of the fittest” into circulation, five years before Darwin, and indeed he who, for good or ill, prepared the ground for the reception of Darwin with his writings on “evolution” from the early 1850s.

Oh, and finally, there are a number of chapters on episodes of administrative history. Specific events like the politics around the construction of a government building can by fascinating windows into a different world. But at times it felt like Heffer couldn’t resist passing on every archival nugget he found.

25 people found this helpful

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Maria

Good History

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2021

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Very interesting

One person found this helpful

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J. P Spencer

Hard slog by a High Tory

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2021

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Disappointing. Heffer provides a lot of social history about Victorian England but I found it a hard slog. This partly may be because he gives far too much credit to reformers who did the least they could and left matters not that much better than they found them.

5 people found this helpful

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Thomas M. Sullivan

T.M.I.

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2019

Holy cow. Gee whiz. Wowser. This is a lot of information. That is, too much information. It’s as if the author decided somewhere along the line that having done all the meticulous research necessary to produce this tome he might as well set out all he found and let the reader sort the important from the, uh, arguably interesting. Not unlike buying a box of Raisin Bran only to discover that the raisins are few and far between and one’s enjoyment of them is dulled by how much bran has to be digested. Doubly unfortunate because there are a whole bunch of interesting stories lurking in there somewhere but not worth the discovery.

11 people found this helpful

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marion coulson

Pretty tedious!

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2014

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I haven't finished it yet. Don't know if I ever will. Interesting but too much too much detail!! I found the first chapters really interested, but got bogged down int the philosophical chapters.

9 people found this helpful

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David Wolf

Physically unreadable

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2022

Got this as a holiday gift from my son. Excellent writing as always. Physically the paperback is a joke. You can’t hold it, leave alone hols it open! I had to cut mine in half, which is insane for a $27 book! Buy the Kindle edition if you want to read this and not have a mountain of confetti!

2 people found this helpful

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Howard Harding

Most important text I ever read of a subject I thought I knew at 'A' levels in 1958.HH.

Reviewed in Canada on February 15, 2024

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See headline. Still writing my own 'history'. This book has helped clarify and focus things I thought I 'knew' over 55 years ago. HH.

Client d'Amazon

trés bien

Reviewed in France on January 31, 2020

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trés bien

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David Bisset

A survey on the grand scale

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 26, 2018

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Simon Heffer covers a multiplicity of themes. He writes fluently, sometimes tendentiously, and deals with his themes in great detail. It is an enormously detailed volume. In areas which are not my particular interest the sense narrative was hard going, but in in areas which cover my personal interests such as architectural and urban history I had no problems! In his biographical explorations Heffer fully justified his title High Minds. The Victorian Era is certainly still with us!

5 people found this helpful

glennx

Comprehensive study of the social changes taking place in 19C Britain

Reviewed in Canada on October 8, 2020

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Each chapter is about a separate topic of social change during the period so you dont have to read the book from front to back, although it helps if you do.
Mr Heffer has researched this thoroughly and there is a lot of detail in the book which I loved.

Wordsmith

My goodness what a big read this is! It ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 2, 2018

Verified Purchase

My goodness what a big read this is! It is very interesting, throwing a light on matters we take for granted now , We think about the trials of getting votes for women but getting votes for men below a certain social standing was a real fight as well. And even then their social 'superiors' wanted access to their votes to see who they had voted for! What battles there were in Parliament over education for the 'lower classes' , and the divorce laws! And I had no idea that the erection of the Albert Memorial had taken so long and involved so much argument.
A thoroughly valuable read..

10 people found this helpful

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