TheVictorians

"We had always been convinced that Victorianism was a myth, engendered by the long life of the sovereign and of her most illustrious subjects. We were constantly being told that the Victorians did this, or the Victorians thought that, while my own difficulty was to find anything on which they agreed: any assumption which was not at some time or other fiercely challenged. 'Victorian History'.


If thereto the State added a safe and healthy workshop, a decent ...

If thereto the State added a safe and healthy workshop, a decent house, and a good school, what more was there left to think of? By Early Victorian conceptions, little or nothing.

By Late Victorian, much.

Security remained; and leisure; the defence of the standard against the inrush of underpaid labour, casual or unskilled: protection against contingencies, support in old age.

These are the ideas of the new age; and they embody themselves in a series of measures which pick up the thread of social legislation, dropped in the political convulsions of the Russian years and the Irish years, and culminate in what, though out of time, are in spirit the last of the great Victorian statutes, the Education Act of 1902 and the Insurance Act of 1911. IF we range the forces operating on society at any moment into the Conformist and the Dissident, or the Stabilizing and the Exploratory, and apply this canon to the development of Victorian England, we shall remark how singularly detached they are from the traditional alignment of parties. There is one pattern of ideas, and another of parties, and of ideas neither party seems to be more or less receptive than the other.

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The most we can say is that on the whole for a ...

The most we can say is that on the whole for a generation after 1830, Liberalism suited England best, for a generation before 1900, Conservatism; while the dominant tendency

'We still demand, as we always have demanded, that wherever privilege exists, ...

'We still demand, as we always have demanded, that wherever privilege exists, it shall be abated, in such degree and measure as the welfare of the State requires. It was we who deliver

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