A N Wilson's compendious and exuberant account of the Victorian era
is provocative in that he sees our world as the Victorian world
unchanged. It's not a matter of influence, but of basic social
structure and spiritual, philosophical and political
preoccupations. Even colonialism is still with us in the form of
the exportation of liberal values, whether through Christian Aid or
the United Nations. This is a portrait of an age, certainly not an
academic history. As such it is personal and journalistic,
sometimes novelistic in its approach. Wilson's restless mind flits
from personality to personality; characters and illustrative
anecdotes are more important than the broad brush-strokes of more
theoretically inclined and overt commentators. It's justified in
being a huge, detailed book for a 'baggy monster' of an era. A vast
wealth of literature of the period has been digested and
assimilated - Carlyle, Christina Rossetti, Mayhew's London lives,
the art criticism of Ruskin, but also people like Harriet Martineau
who were popular at the time but are no longer read. These
perspectives are reflected back to us in a way we in the 21st
century can comprehend. Whether Wilson's subject is Chartism, the
Crimean War or experiments in photography, his energetic style does
justice to the vitality and wit of an era so often regarded as
stuffy. The death of Victoria's predecessor William IV, 'dropsical,
drunken, stupid', is clearly a moment Wilson relishes. Victoria's
own decline is marked by the image of bored equerries at Osborne
House playing golf in the snow with red billiard balls. For the
most part secondary sources are used, and amongst the wealth of
incident and tale-telling, which at points becomes somewhat
disorganized and rambling, there's no great originality. But it is
engaging in the style of a novel by Dickens, whose view of the
Victorian world was of a 'teeming, moving screen of hilarious
characters', an aesthetic which Wilson's historiography
deliberately and successfully adapts. (Kirkus UK)
People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The 'global village' is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.
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