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Title: The Victorians by A. N. Wilson ISBN: 0-393-04974-4 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tour de force
Comment: This is a remarkable survey of the Victorian age. It covers all aspects of society and how things changed, both intellectually, artistically and materially.
The books begins with Victoria's crowning and ends with her death. In between these two landmarks, the reader is treated to a cast of thousands which include Melbourne, Gladstone, Disraeli, Dickens, George Eliot, imperialism, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, Florence Nightingale, William Steed, Oscar Wilde, Christian Socialism, organized labor, the poor laws and William Morris.
Wilson is ever in command of his facts and materials and this book is probably one of the best researched single volumes on the period in some time. Wilson does more than present old wine in new bottles, but provides a 21st century perspective on the evolution of 19th century Britain.
Rating: 2
Summary: A Literary Tantrum
Comment: Upon purchasing A.N. Wilson's "The Victorians," I hoped it might be an insightful, if somewhat anecdotal, survey of nineteenth century British Society. Unfortunately, this tome serves as the author's pulpit to preach a Marxist interpretation of the period.
Wilson repeatedly focuses on the negative aspects of Victorian society while one-sidedly offering the viewpoints of Marx and Engels.
This grand age gave the world great inventions, advances in science and medicine, improvements to agriculture and urban planning, free trade, foundations of universal education, modern conveniences, a flourishing of arts and letters, mass transportation, communication and production. Spurred by capitalism, this monumental output, both psychic and material, raised the standard of living for the vast majority of the population and was responsible for the creation o the largest middle class the world had seen to date.
Of course workhouses, poverty, and poor working conditions were extant, especially in the first half of the century. But what Wilson fails to see is the general trend towards improvement over the course of time.
One can't help but feel Wilson's frustration that the Chartists could not pull off a Bolshevistic revolution in 1848. Oh, and one best not disagree with Marx, as the author warns, "The truth is, as Marx saw very clearly, that there is a genuine difference of interest between the workers and the bourgeoisie. Any dissent from such a view...is a con." Really? Or perhaps, any dissent from entrenched leftwing academic demagoguery is a con.
Indignant, Wilson spews forth that "This was a ruthless, grabbing, competitive, male-dominated society, stamping on its victims and discarding its weaker members with all the devastating relentlessness of mutant species in Darwin's vision of Nature itself." At this point in his argument, the author conveniently overlooks the vastly charitable nature of these people. After all, was it not the Victorians who gave us the Red Cross and the Salvation Army?
Capitalistic, energetic, creative, the Victorians created a society greater than anything seen before in history. Their thoughts and deeds have far more contributed to, than detracted from, the betterment of society.
Rating: 4
Summary: "The thoughts that shake mankind."
Comment: "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
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Title: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson ISBN: 0465023282 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K. Massie ISBN: 0679456716 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet ISBN: 0312283261 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 10 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Gendering Talk by Robert Hopper ISBN: 0870136364 Publisher: Michigan State Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution 1814-1852 by Philip Mansel ISBN: 0312308574 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 05 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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