The Victorians

About this book

A dramatic revisionist panorama of an age whose material triumphs and spiritual crises prefigure our own. The nineteenth century saw greater changes than any previous era: in the ways nations and societies were organized in scientific knowledge and in nonreligious intellectual development. The crucial players in this drama were the British who invented both capitalism and imperialism and were incomparably the richest most important investors in the developing world. In this sense Englands position has strong resemblances to Americas in the late twentieth century. As one of our most accomplished biographers and novelists A. N. Wilson has a keen eye for a good story and in this spectacular work he singles out those writers statesmen scientists philosophers and soldiers whose lives illuminate so grand and revolutionary a history: Darwin Marx Gladstone Christina Rossetti Gordon Cardinal Newman George Eliot Kipling. Wilsons accomplishment in this book is to explain through these signature lives how Victorian England started a revolution that still hasnt ended. 65 illustrations