The master historian celebrates the men and women who shaped events between 1838 and 1880 in a book which is part social history, part intellectual history and partly the political history of those years. A sense of earnest, disinterested moral purpose distinguished many politicians, intellectuals and citizens of mid-19th century Britain, and drove them to improve the condition of the whole of society. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in June 1837, Britain was a country of rising prosperity with a growing Empire and a burgeoning middle class made more affluent by industrialism. However, it was also beset by destabilising social problems and there was little attempt to regulate public health and prevent the frequent cholera outbreaks. Cities teemed with prostitutes, the girls driven to vice by the threat of starvation, boys and men often lapsed into crime and were punished with a savagery little diminished from medieval times. Travel was slow and so expensive that most people never strayed more than a few miles from home and even communication by letter was expensive until the introduction of the Penny Post in May 1840. Many poor people were illiterate. But the great transformation in those 40 years or so was visible all over Britain: whole suburbs of housing, town halls, museums, concert halls, art galleries, schools, colleges, hospitals, libraries, railway stations, market halls and Gothic Revival churches spoke of a country that had with determination and a sense of common direction put its new-found wealth to use in improving the lives, minds and souls of its people. These radical changes came about largely by 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 mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. The narrative analyses the birth of new attitudes in education, religion and science and shows how taste in architecture collided with broader debates about the direction that the country should take. Here are the great writers like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Butler and the great projects such as the Great Exhibition in a superbly nuanced portrait of this extraordinary era. A superb heavyweight history book, 878pp, 16 pages of colour and b/w illus.
Additional product information
