Over all those late Victorian years hovers the airy and graceful spirit ...

Over all those late Victorian years hovers the airy and graceful spirit of the School Inspector, ingeminating Forro unum en necesseirium: organize your secondary education; and in the background, at the end of every avenue, stands the lonely and uncomprehended figure of the Prince Consort, surrounded by the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition of 1851. A SENSE of vagueness, of incoherence and indirection, grows on us as we watch the eighties struggling for a foothold in the swirl and wreckage of new ideas and old beliefs. We must allow, it is true, for the distraction of interest by external affairs.

But if we could, in imagination, first neutralize the Irish deflexion, and then remove the preoccupation with questions of Empire and defence, thus studying the England of 1890 as a direct outgrowth of the England of 1860, we should notice as the chief symptoms of internal change, first a greater care for the amenities of life, natural and domestic; and, behind this, a far more critical attitude towards the structure of society which few could any longer think of as divinely ordered, or logically irrefutable.

The mind of 1890 would have startled the mind of 1886 by its frank secularism, not less than by its aesthetic and Socialistic tone. More particularly and concretely, especially if our eye falls on the winters of 1889 and 1890, we should observe a new, and grave, attention to the problem of poverty as exemplified by London.