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'.


The Pickwick Papers is not a Victorian document: it belongs to a ...

The Pickwick Papers is not a Victorian document: it belongs to a sunnier time, which perhaps had never existed.

The group of novels that follow, Oliver Twist, Zachary Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, is charged with the atmosphere of the thirties. They have the Radical faith in progress, the Radical dislike of obstruction and privilege, the Radical indifference to the historic appeal.

But they part from the Radicalism of the Benthamites in their equal indifference to the scientific appeal. Dickens's ideal England was not very far from Billy Owen's.

...read on >>

 

victorians

Virtual Victorians History Website


 

But it was to be built by some magic of goodwill overriding ...

But it was to be built by some

magic of goodwill overriding the egoism of

progress; not by law, and most emphatically not by logic. The economists and the reformers

Sir Phillip Agnew's Sunday Observance Bill, the most rigorous piece of moral-and, ...