Portrait of an Age

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Carl Guldager

The Victorians, by A. N. Wilson, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 724 pp.

A. N. WILSON, award-winning novelist, acclaimed biographer, and author of various other writings, sets out in this latest work to paint, as he says, "the portrait of an age," a task he admirably accomplishes, but not before overcoming several daunting hazards. First, he must rescue the reputation of the Victorians, who have been described as victims of the "enormous condescension of posterity," condemned as materialist, racist, self-righteous, hypocritical, imperialist, even, as snidely observed, "worst of all, earnest." Yet it was these same sturdy, steadfast Britons, Wilson attests, who confronted the most tumultuous challenges: the incredible rise of industrialism, the rapid spread of the railroads, the shift from farm labor to work in mines and mills, the teeming swarm to city living, the soulwrenching clash of new scientific ideas with ancient religious beliefs, and, ultimately, the burden of empire.

Not only is Wilson successful in putting down the slander of the Victorians as smug, stuffy, and inhibited, showing them rather as innovative, energetic, and enterprising, but he chronicles their progress in such meaningful areas as women's rights and the increasing participation of the common people in government. And finally, his account possesses a point of view that T.S. Eliot once described as unusually important, "a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."

A notorious source for the vilification of the Victorians is Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Appearing in 1918, it treats four idols of the times: Dr. Arnold of Rugby School, Cardinal Manning, General Gordon of Khartoum, and Nurse Florence Nightingale. But Strachey's purpose is not to praise them, rather to bury their reputations in ridicule, based on innuendoes, lies, and exaggerations. The effect has been devastating. Wilson, in rebuttal, borrowed Strachey's title and produced in 1989 laudatory accounts of such Victorian notables as Prince Albert, Charlotte Bronte, Gladstone, and Cardinal Newman. In this text there also appeared the author's personal view of the age:

  When I think of Victorian England, I think of energy: irrepressible
  physical energy, intellectual, industrial, moral energy. I think of a
  place where machines are perpetually turning, where factories belch
  smoke, where canals and railroads, laden with produce, carry freight
  to warehouses and ports. I think, too, of the great ships, setting out
  from Liverpool and Hull and London, to destinations all over the
  world. I think of the merchants, the explorers, the colonizers, the
  evangelists and engineers all self-conflidently taking abroad their
  skills and prejudices and calling the result of their endeavors the
  British empire.

  At home I think of the stupendous engineering achievements of Brunel;
  I think of the literary fertility of Carlyle, Ruskin or Browning,
  filling volume after volume of library shelf. I think of all the
  movement and life of the Victorian city--the crowds, the streetcries,
  the clatter of wheels on cobblestones, the plight of the poor and the
  adventures of the criminal. I think of the London of Mayhew, Dickens,
  and Sherlock Holmes.

As though that was not enough of a preamble to his present volume, Wilson in 1999 produced God's Funeral, the title taken from Thomas Hardy's poem. This work traced the impact of philosophical thinking and scientific discovery, most notably Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), upon organized religion and personal belief. In describing this central tragedy of the times, it poignantly relates the great distress of those who felt they could no longer believe and the deeply shaken foundations of the faiths that survived.

From all this the author would seem to come fully armed to his present panorama of a magnificent if misunderstood century, dated usually to correspond with Queen Victoria's life (1819-1901) or to the advent of The Great War in 1914. The author's approach appears, at first glance, somewhat awkward and unpromising. Part I, Early Victorian, covers all the early years, while succeeding parts are devoted each to a decade, from Part II, The Eighteen-Fifties to Part VI, The Eighteen-Nineties. However, within each of these divisions, Wilson treats topic after topic in a most engaging manner, among them: "Victoria's Inheritance," "Famine in Ireland," "Mesmerism," "John Stuart Mill's Boiled Egg," "Kipling's India," "The Scarlet Threat of Murder." Taken together, the overall result is like a mosaic and very effective, the Victorians and their times coming alive.

As a sampler of Wilson's style and substance, take the chapter entitled "Country Parishes," which opens with his remark, "It is difficult for me to conceive of any more agreeable way of life than that of the Victorian country parson." He then imagines himself, born in the 1830s, son of a parson, avoiding a public school education through being thought "delicate," and arriving at Balliol with a good knowledge of Greek to be taught by Benjamin Jowett.