In these brilliant essays, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most respected scholars of Victorian thought and culture, explores the many facets, public and private, of the Victorian idea of morality. Incisively and provocatively she illuminates the "moral imagination" of the Victorians, "the imagination that treasured the complexity of the heart and mind and that sought, by aesthetic means as well as ethical, to adorn and enhance rather than destroy the 'decent drapery of life.'" The conventional view of Victorianism-a Family Shakespeare purged of indelicacies, piano legs sheathed in pantaloons, and the works of male and female authors chastely residing on separate shelves-gives way to the subtle and sympathetic analysis of an ethos that combined a profound sense of social and moral responsibility with a remarkable tolerance for idiosyncrasy and individuality. Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians invites us to reconsider the complex and colorful panorama of ideas and attitudes, beliefs and behavior, that goes under the name of Victorianism-and it reconsiders well our own relation to that much abused and misunderstood culture. "An important book that deserves a wide readership. It deserves to be read for the critical quality of Miss Himmelfarb's mind and the constant questioning of fashionable attitudes. One does not have to agree with her to enjoy the characteristic sharpness of her writing, or the characteristic breadth of her reading."-New York Times Book Review. "A collection of extraordinarily intelligent essays, held together not by a single thread of argument but by the sustained moral imagination of an acute student of nineteenth-century life and thought....Miss Himmelfarb's essays make clear that there was nothing wrong with either the Victorians' morality or their imaginations."-National Review.

In her enduring study of the impact of Darwinism on the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, Gertrude Himmelfarb brings massive documentation to bear in challenging the conventional view of Darwin's greatness. Touching on biography, history, and philosophy, she traces the origins and development of Darwin's views against the opinions of his time; assesses the influences on him; and shows what he intended his theory to mean, what his readers took it to mean, and what it has in fact meant. By such a route Ms. Himmelfarb recaptures "a sense of how a scientist, with the most innocent of intentions and the best of faith, can give birth to a theory that has an ancestry and a posterity of which he may be ignorant and a life of its own over which he has no control. "A thorough and masterly book punctuated with a delicate sense of humor.... Until he has read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested this authoritative volume, no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism." "Times Literary Supplement" "An illuminating contribution...a dramatic story." "Yale Review" "Absorbing, well written, and splendidly organized." I. Bernard Cohen

In The Moral Imagination, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times. In their distinctive ways, she argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the "moral imagination." Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, and writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. It is this passion that makes their reflections-on politics and literature, religion and society, marriage and sex-sometimes unpredictable, often controversial, always exciting, and as illuminating and pertinent today as they were then. The second edition includes a revised introduction and three new essays on Adam Smith, Lord Acton, and Alfred Marshall.

‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’

On Liberty is dedicated to one simple principle: that men and women should be free to do as they please, without interference from society or the State, unless their actions might cause harm to others. While many of his immediate prdecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to William Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who transformed the concept into a philosophy, claiming for it a central role in social policy and government and arguing for a redrawing of the line between the authority wielded by the State and the independence of the individual – a view that continues to inform debates about personal liberty to this day.

This edition contains an introduction, which puts the work in its biographical and political context, and explores the unresolved contradictions in liberal philosophy.

In a provocative study that bristles with contemporary relevance, Himmelfarb demonstrates that the material and moral dimensions of poverty were inseparable in the minds of late Victorians, be they radical or conservative.

A wide-ranging collection of Victorian writings by John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and other leading lights of the era None of the stereotypes of Victorian England-narrow-minded, inhibited, moralistic, complacent-prepares us for the vitality, variety, and above all extraordinary quality of intellectual life displayed in this volume of essays. Selected and annotated by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of Victorian thought, the writings address a wide range of subjects-religion, politics, history, science, art, socialism, and feminism-by eminent figures of the era, including Carlyle, Mill, Macaulay, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and Wilde. The selections reflect what Himmelfarb terms "the spirit of the age"-contentious as well as earnest, given to high aspirations and convictions, and at the same time subject to deep anxieties and doubts. The Victorians, undisputed masters of the long, serious essay, found the genre congenial to the expression of their most compelling and provocative views. This volume offers a representative sampling of essays from the early, middle, and late Victorian periods, each accompanied by an introductory note. Himmelfarb also introduces the volume with two enlightening essays, one on the evolving spirit of the age, and the other on the essay as a genre and on the important periodicals that attracted such a large and engaged audience.

For this updated edition of her acclaimed work on historians and the writing of history, Gertrude Himmelfarb adds four insightful and provocative essays dealing with changes in the discipline over the past twenty years.

In examining the effects of postmodernism, the illusions of cosmopolitanism, A. J. P. Taylor and revisionism, and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history," Himmelfarb enriches her illuminating exploration of the myriad ways--new and old--in which historians make sense of the past.

From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines.

One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures."

Gertrude Himmelfarb's elegant and wonderfully readable work, The Roads to Modernity, reclaims the Enlightenment from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and in America. Himmerlfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic - humane, compassionate and realistic - that still resonates strongly today.

In these provocative essays, one of our most distinguished historians looks into the abyss of the present. Himmelfarb exposes the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of some of our most fashionable current ideas--and shows how the vogue for historical structuralism has made it possible to trivialize the tragedy of the Holocaust.

In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment-an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America.
Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic-humane, compassionate, and realistic-that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe.
The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.