Victorian minds

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

"Where "Victorianism" once conjured up an image of smugness, hypocrisy, and mindlessness, it now suggests quite the reverse: an age of high intellectual, moral, and spiritual tension, in which the typical problems of modernity were posed in their most acute forms.... The "Victorian ethos" describes the transmutation of a religious creed into a social ethic--an ethic providing for more mobility, flexibility, and variety than is generally supposed. The "Victorian angst" is concerned with the permutation of belief and unbelief that testify to the notorious "crisis of faith." "Varieties of social Darwinism" points to the multiplicity of social and political ideologies that sought, and continue to seek, legitimization in science. "Politics and ideology" is a study of the unwitting and witting transformation of England into a democracy, and of the still unresolved problems posed by that event. and the essays on individual thinkers, ranging in time and character from Edmund Burke to John Buch