In an age of radical transformation, the Victorians were caught
between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. In the face of
such a dizzying present, connecting with their past became for the
Victorians a kind of survival strategy - this nostalgia took forms
as diverse as their obsession with history and origins; the
religious revivalism of the Oxford Movement; and the new Houses of
Parliament, built in 1834, whose design looked longingly back to
the Middle Ages.
This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural
climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John
Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of
the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from
Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens
and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common
experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older
idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new
image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland
of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.
This beautifully written meditation provides a vivid, compelling
and authoritative portrait of an era that, in the face of an
exhilarating and menacing present, longingly embraced the stability
and comfort of a past both real and imagined.
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