Portrait of an Age.

The Victorians, by A. N. Wilson, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 724 pp.

A. N. WILSON, award-winning novelist, acclaimed biographer, and author of various other writings, sets out in this latest work to paint, as he says, "the portrait of an age," a task he admirably accomplishes, but not before overcoming several daunting hazards. First, he must rescue the reputation of the Victorians, who have been described as victims of the "enormous condescension of posterity," condemned as materialist, racist, self-righteous, hypocritical, imperialist, even, as snidely observed, "worst of all, earnest." Yet it was these same sturdy, steadfast Britons, Wilson attests, who confronted the most tumultuous challenges: the incredible rise of industrialism, the rapid spread of the railroads, the shift from farm labor to work in mines and mills, the teeming swarm to city living, the soulwrenching clash of new scientific ideas with ancient religious beliefs, and, ultimately, the burden of empire.

Not only is Wilson successful in putting down the slander of the Victorians as smug, stuffy, and inhibited, showing them rather as innovative, energetic, and enterprising, but he chronicles their progress in such meaningful areas as women's rights and the increasing participation of the common people in government. And finally, his account possesses a point of view that T.S. Eliot once described as unusually important, "a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."

A notorious source for the vilification of the Victorians is Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Appearing in 1918, it treats four idols of the times: Dr. Arnold of Rugby School, Cardinal Manning, General Gordon of Khartoum, and Nurse Florence Nightingale. But Strachey's purpose is not to praise them, rather to bury their reputations in ridicule, based on innuendoes, lies, and exaggerations. The effect has been devastating. Wilson, in rebuttal, borrowed Strachey's title and produced in 1989 laudatory accounts of such Victorian notables as Prince Albert, Charlotte Bronte, Gladstone, and Cardinal Newman. In this text there also appeared the author's personal view of the age:

  When I think of Victorian England, I think of energy: irrepressible
  physical energy, intellectual, industrial, moral energy. I think of a
  place where machines are perpetually turning, where factories belch
  smoke, where canals and railroads, laden with produce, carry freight
  to warehouses and ports. I think, too, of the great ships, setting out
  from Liverpool and Hull and London, to destinations all over the
  world. I think of the merchants, the explorers, the colonizers, the
  evangelists and engineers all self-conflidently taking abroad their
  skills and prejudices and calling the result of their endeavors the
  British empire.

  At home I think of the stupendous engineering achievements of Brunel;
  I think of the literary fertility of Carlyle, Ruskin or Browning,
  filling volume after volume of library shelf. I think of all the
  movement and life of the Victorian city--the crowds, the streetcries,
  the clatter of wheels on cobblestones, the plight of the poor and the
  adventures of the criminal. I think of the London of Mayhew, Dickens,
  and Sherlock Holmes.

As though that was not enough of a preamble to his present volume, Wilson in 1999 produced God's Funeral, the title taken from Thomas Hardy's poem. This work traced the impact of philosophical thinking and scientific discovery, most notably Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), upon organized religion and personal belief. In describing this central tragedy of the times, it poignantly relates the great distress of those who felt they could no longer believe and the deeply shaken foundations of the faiths that survived.

From all this the author would seem to come fully armed to his present panorama of a magnificent if misunderstood century, dated usually to correspond with Queen Victoria's life (1819-1901) or to the advent of The Great War in 1914. The author's approach appears, at first glance, somewhat awkward and unpromising. Part I, Early Victorian, covers all the early years, while succeeding parts are devoted each to a decade, from Part II, The Eighteen-Fifties to Part VI, The Eighteen-Nineties. However, within each of these divisions, Wilson treats topic after topic in a most engaging manner, among them: "Victoria's Inheritance," "Famine in Ireland," "Mesmerism," "John Stuart Mill's Boiled Egg," "Kipling's India," "The Scarlet Threat of Murder." Taken together, the overall result is like a mosaic and very effective, the Victorians and their times coming alive.

As a sampler of Wilson's style and substance, take the chapter entitled "Country Parishes," which opens with his remark, "It is difficult for me to conceive of any more agreeable way of life than that of the Victorian country parson." He then imagines himself, born in the 1830s, son of a parson, avoiding a public school education through being thought "delicate," and arriving at Balliol with a good knowledge of Greek to be taught by Benjamin Jowett.

After his ordination, election to a fellowship, and a few years of teaching undergraduates, he would marry, resign his fellowship, and accept a college living, preferably a medieval church, with a large drafty Georgian rectory and sufficient church acreage to provide for his family. "By now," he adds, "it would be, let us say, the 1860s, and I shall remain here for the next forty years, a faithful friend to generations of villagers to whom I would act as teacher, amateur doctor and social worker, as well as priest."

Towards the end of his days, he supposes, he would become fearful that the Age of Faith, represented by his ancient church where, every day, he reads aloud from the Book of Common Prayer, was being destroyed "whether by Capitalism, or Darwin, or Railways or Imperialism ... who could say?"

Turning from this fantasy life, Wilson delves into the quaint and charming reallife diaries kept by the Reverend Francis Kilvert for a decade or so when he was curate of Clyro in Radnorshire and vicar of Bredwardine in the Wye Valley of Herefordshire. As Wilson observes, "Kilvert has painted England and Wales before they were 'wrecked' by cars, macadamed roads, supermarkets, factory farms, holidays for all--with their attendant holiday-cottages--retirement bungalows, theme parks, science parks, carparks and railway stations called parkway."

Idyllic as those early days sound, Wilson concedes, they were years of desperate poverty as well. The impact of the industrial revolution on the rural poor was awful. Their lives had never been easy, he admits, but the wealthy new world coming into being in the 1870s must have seemed even bleaker to the have-nots.

After an appraisal of the clergymanpoet William Barnes, whose verses were in the dialect of his native Dorset and expressed a deep regret for a way of life that would never come again, Wilson notes that one of his admirers was Thomas Hardy, who composed a memorable verse, "The Last Signal," for his old friend's funeral. Hardy, Wilson comments, "is one of those great writers--Carlyle was one, in the late twentieth century Solzhenitsyn was another--who do not merely produce great artworks, but who seem to embody in their life-pilgrimage deep truths about the nature of their own times."

In Hardy's great novels are encountered "human beings against whom all the odds are stacked." This was, of course, Hardy's own expectation of life. From his notebook of October 30, 1870, there is this gloomy observation: "Mother's notion & also mine: that a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any permanent prospect we indulge in as profitable." Wilson further cites a reviewer's remark that Hardy's most popular book, "except for a few hours spent with cows, has not a gleam of sunshine anywhere."

Giving up his grim, controversial novels, Hardy concentrated on poetry, revealing himself "as the most religious ... the most spiritually engaged of all great Victorian writers." His most affecting effort is to be found, Wilson believes, not in any of his wrenching novels, but in a simple poem, in "the honest yearning of 'The Oxen,'" which Wilson repeats in part:

  Yet, I feel,
  If someone said on Christmas Eve,
  "Come, see the oxen kneel
  In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
  Our childhood used to know,"
  I should go with him in the gloom,
  Hoping it might be so.

In other chapters, the British are shown struggling throughout the nineteenth century with challenges at home and abroad. But, while their Continental neighbors were beset with social unrest and uprisings, in 1848, the Year of Revolution, the British through a series of timely reform bills ameliorated the abuses of child labor, the long hours and dismal conditions of the laboring man, achieving representative Parliamentary rule, a forum that encouraged democratic practices and political stability. The path to empire was no less challenging with troubles abroad through native revolts in India, Africa, China, and the Caribbean. Still, foreign affairs were managed without a major conflict, the Crimean War being dismissed as unnecessary and meaningless.

A further appreciation for the events and personalities of the Victorian Age is provided in this book through pages of illustration. There is a photo of the early, puffing 1845 teapot locomotive and a preview of "automobilism," showing the carriage-like contraption preceded by a man carrying a red flag, to warn the world of what was coming. Among the most famous pictured are Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens, Marx, Ruskin, Gladstone, and Disraeli. There is a scene from Gilbert and Sullivan, photos of the comedienne Marie Lloyd and the pioneering Florence Nightingale. There are scenes from the Crimean War and from struggles with the Boers, the Zulus, the Indian Mutiny.

Some works of the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their models are shown. Also, engineering and architectural marvels, the great Forth Bridge, the Crystal Palace. The little old lady who was Queen of England and the Empress of India is pictured, as well as her handsome and intelligent consort, Prince Albert. Aristocrats are shown in their palaces, slum children playing in city streets. Altogether they make a Victorian family album, reflecting the personalities and the temper of the times.

The first sentence in this book is, "The Victorians are still with us." This is also the final impression gained from its pages, for, as Wilson convincingly documents, we still live in the world they created, still changing, still challenging. Certainly the seed of today's globalization can be found in their vasttrade empire. The first agitators for women's rights are the forerunners of the suffragettes and present-day feminists. Early concern for individual rights and the rule of law continue in the struggle now for human rights and for democracy.

In further evidence of the impact of their past upon our present, follow the power rivalries between England, France, and Germany leading to the Great War of 1914, a bloodletting that brought on the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian states, the ordeal of World War II, and the only lately ended Cold War. For the advent of the railroad and the telegraph, witness the further changes in transportation and communication, the airplane, radio, and television, the spread of road-ways with cars everywhere, and the worldwide web of the computer.

The dynamic and drastic changes of the nineteenth century led to even more upset in succeeding decades, the fall of the great empires, the disappearance of crowned heads, and the waning influence of the aristocracy. Even intellectuals and elitists, like Strachey and the Bloomsbury set, were left attempting to support their superiority by ridiculing the rising middle class and their bourgeois values. But a contemporary chronicler, sensing the new importance of the affairs of ordinary people, Lord Acton, announced, "The great historian now takes his meals in the kitchen."

For all of the changes that time has brought, the spirit of the Victorians still persists. In the long gallery of history, the portrait of an age that Wilson has artfully presented shows not only their world but also ours, for us to ponder and to appreciate, the intertwined trials and triumphs of their days and ours.

CARL GULDAGER is a regular contributor to Modern Age: A Quarterly Review.