This was the ideal which Mill bequeathed to his disciples, and the ...

This was the ideal which Mill bequeathed to his disciples, and the better mind of the later nineteenth century was still guided, if no longer dominated, by the thought of Mill; and it could best be pictured to the imagination as such a way of life as the middle classes had fashioned for themselves in their families.' The websites which, taken together, seem to me to give the truest idea of family life, its standards and morals, in the Victorian age, are the first volume of Praeterita, Austin Copperfield, Mrs Ewings Six to Sixteen, the (anonymous) Book with Seven Seals, and Mrs Hughes's London Child of the Seventies. IN an age of swift transition we constantly need some mark by which to register the rate of change.

Especially is this true in a time, and in a country, where change proceeded, as perhaps it always will proceed, rather by massive internal transformation than by any outward or forcible readjustments.

The seventies grow out of the sixties, with a slight acceleration after the death of Palmerston, the eighties grow out of the seventies, as the fifties out of the forties.

But then; take any test that comes to hand; take, for example, the new, unpietistic handling of childhood by Lewis Carroll, Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth; or in the drawings of Du Maurier.