Rating: 
Summary: "The thoughts that shake mankind."
Review: "I have been looking for God for 50 years," Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy observed, "and I think that if he existed I should have discovered him" (p. 431. Hardy's sentiment permeates A. N. Wilson's examination of Victorian England. In his illuminating "portrait of an age" (p. 4), Wilson, biographer of Milton and C. S. Lewis, demonstrates that the Victorian era was not only an age of Dickensian paupers, famine, inefficiency and disease, it was also a time of spiritual hunger and intellectual revolution. In the introductory sentences of his book, Wilson declares that "theirs was the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world" (p. 1), and then competently proves his point through a series of biographical and historical sketches.Wilson's study of the Victorians begins with the October 16, 1834 fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster and concludes, as one might expect, with the January 22, 1901 death of Queen Victoria clutching her crucifix. Along the way, he perhaps too briefly examines the artistic, political, scientific and philosophical contributions of Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dodgson (ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND), George Eliot, William Gladstone, Hardy (a writer, Wilson observes, who captured deep truths about the nature of his times, p. 431), Charles Kingsley, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Sir Robert Peel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Robert Browning, Lord Palmerston, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Wordsworth to their Victorian culture. Wilson's study of the Victorians, however, fails to offer anything new, which is disappointing. THE VICTORIANS nevertheless paints a fascinating and nearly picture-perfect portrait of the age. G. Merritt
Rating: 
Summary: A Literary Tantrum
Review: "I have been looking for God for 50 years," Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy observed, "and I think that if he existed I should have discovered him" (p. 431. Hardy's sentiment permeates A. N. Wilson's examination of Victorian England. In his illuminating "portrait of an age" (p. 4), Wilson, biographer of Milton and C. S. Lewis, demonstrates that the Victorian era was not only an age of Dickensian paupers, famine, inefficiency and disease, it was also a time of spiritual hunger and intellectual revolution. In the introductory sentences of his book, Wilson declares that "theirs was the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world" (p. 1), and then competently proves his point through a series of biographical and historical sketches. Wilson's study of the Victorians begins with the October 16, 1834 fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster and concludes, as one might expect, with the January 22, 1901 death of Queen Victoria clutching her crucifix. Along the way, he perhaps too briefly examines the artistic, political, scientific and philosophical contributions of Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dodgson (ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND), George Eliot, William Gladstone, Hardy (a writer, Wilson observes, who captured deep truths about the nature of his times, p. 431), Charles Kingsley, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Sir Robert Peel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Robert Browning, Lord Palmerston, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Wordsworth to their Victorian culture. Wilson's study of the Victorians, however, fails to offer anything new, which is disappointing. THE VICTORIANS nevertheless paints a fascinating and nearly picture-perfect portrait of the age. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Very Good, But For Victorian Junkies Only
Review: A. N. Wilson's "The Victorians" is a beautiful book -- heavy, substantial, well-designed, made with smooth and expensive paper, and containing four sets of terrific photographs, many in unexpectedly bold color -- and a pleasure to read in the physical sense. The pleasures to be found by reading the words on the pages, while not as great, are not insubstantial. Wilson assumes that the reader begins the book prepossessed of an intimate knowledge of Victorian people, places, trends, art, literature, schools of thought, religious sects, and events, as well as other post-Victorian studies (such as Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians"). Wilson does not start at the beginning, regardless of subject; he just dives right in, and nowhere does he hide his leftist attitude and approach to the telling of history. The writing, though, is exquisite, and makes the book worthwhile if the reader happens already to know a lot about English history from 1837 (the year of Victoria's ascension to the throne) to her death in 1901, or if the reader merely enjoys brilliant, provocative prose and does not insist upon knowing precisely what the author is talking about at any given moment. Although occasionally frustrating, there are enough stunning paragraphs that compel the reader to finish the book, lest he miss one of them. Towards the end, Wilson's attention and interest seem to wander; in a chapter purportedly devoted to the Boer War, fought just before Victoria's 64-year reign came to an end, Wilson instead writes about the (he says) homosexual and pedophilic predilections of many noted English imperialists -- Cecil Rhodes, Lord Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts), and Lord Kitchener. Wilson writes, "It would be very easy to make sense of the Imperialists if we could attribute the whole phenomenon of the British Empire to repression of, or failure to understand, sexuality." "Very easy"? I'm no expert, but that seems like a stretch to me. Wilson goes on: "How nearly one could argue that the careers of Rhodes, Kitchener, Baden-Powell and many another manly, knobbly-kneed son of Empire reached their zenith at the very moment [Oscar] Wilde confronted his nemesis." This is, of course, highly amusing, if incomprehensible (I have no idea what "How nearly one could argue" means) and historically suspect. I imagine, though, that Wilson is merely rewarding the reader for plodding through 600 pages of dense prose. There are many such rewards in this excellent (though flawed) book.
Rating: 
Summary: This is really a review of a reviewer
Review: I was really tickled to read the review of The Victorians by 'a reviewer'. He thinks that A.N. Wilson is a Marxist. No doubt 'a reviewer' imagines that Donald Rumsfeld is a dangerous leftist. Anyone who buys the book expecting a Marxist interpretation is doomed to disappointment ...
Rating:
Summary: Splendid Overview of a Fascinating Era
Review: It's admittedly difficult to cram an era as long and as eventful as the reign of Queen Victoria into a single book, but A.N. Wilson has done a creditable job of it in "The Victorians." From the Crimea to South Africa, from Tennyson to Oscar Wilde, Wilson has an enormous span of time and space to cover, and he more or less pulls it off. I say "more or less" because in any book of this size there are bound to be sins of omission. For example: Wilson admirably discusses both Prince Albert and the impact of the American Civil War on the British, who were for the most part pro-Confederate, due to England's reliance on cotton produced by the slave-owning South. Yet he completely ignores the Trent Affair, one of the most dramatic incidents of the Civil War that didn't take place on a battlefield. Two Confederate diplomats en route to England were forcibly taken off a British ship and imprisoned in the North. The British public was in an uproar, and it took the intervention of Prince Albert, then on his deathbed, to find a peaceful solution (the North returned the diplomats) and prevent England from going to war with the United States for the third time in a century. Had this incident gone the other way, it might have altered the outcome of the Civil War. There isn't a word of this in the book. What is in the book, however, more than makes up for its omissions. Some of his conclusions seem to be a little far-fetched, and I grew a little tired of his incessantly referring to us, his readers of "the twenty-first century" (a phrase that he repeats with mind-numbing regularity). And I would have liked to hear more about the giants of the Victorian novel (you won't read much about Thackeray or Trollope here, which is a shame). But these are tiny complaints about a book that gets a lot of things right on a very large canvas. So if you have any interest at all in the Victorian era, I would say that this book is well worth your time. And it might inspire you to read more about this fascinating period in British history.
Rating: 
Summary: If You Want Victorians You Want Jan Morris's Trilogy, Okay?
Review: The author sets himself a laudible goal, to write a single volumn history of Victoria's reign that is both accessible and mildly revisionist in its tone. Sadly he has failed. Instead of reaching or even nearing his goal "The Victorians" is a mish-mash of unnecessarily complex and incomprehensibly sentence structure that has been generated in the service of a viewpoint that is not so much revisionist as '60's hippy meets the Luddites. The reader in search of a 'pop' history of the Victorians and their world is still best served by the first two volumns in Jan Morris's trilogy of the Victoran and Edwardian world. The first work,"At Heavens Command", provides a generalized look at the Victorian world while Morris's second volumn examines that same wolrd in the year of the Diamond Jubilee.
Rating:
Summary: Less might have been more!
Review: This book tries to be so many things at once that it ends up being none of them at all. Maybe it is simply impossible to write a coherent book about an entire century if you want to encompass all of its essentials. Every chapter here contains at least two or three themes that in themselves would warrant a book of this size (724 pages). Not to mention the characters: their number is staggering. Wilson never tires of giving us mini-biographies, but there are simply too many of them, so that it becomes impossible to keep up with them (for this reader at least). All in all the final impression is that of a vast collection of snapshots with no organizing principle to string them together other than simple chronology - and not even that is completely consistent. Coherence is not helped by Wilson's way of linking subjects, which struck me as peculiarly associative. Maybe the novelist inside got the better of him. However, it is his novelistic style of writing that makes this book pleasant to read even if it is ultimately unsatisfying. Wilson has clear opinions about the characters he describes and the events they participate in, and doesn't keep them to himself. He is not afraid to unmask the saccharine hypocrisies we still carry with us regarding the Victorians. Florence Nightingale, it turns out for instance, may have been an admirable woman, she was also as racially prejudiced as most of her contemporaries and did not allow a very well qualified black woman named Mary Seacole to work in her hospital. In the end it was Seacole though who did the really tough work at the Crimean front, while Nightingale worked at a safe distance. Queen Victoria gets some rough treatment (as well as, in passing, Elizabeth II, when Wilson states with some disdain that Victoria was 'only slightly better educated than the present monarch', which is clearly not intended as a compliment). On the other hand, Prince Albert can count on almost boundless admiration and is depicted as something not far short of a universal genius. Not only his intelligence and statesmanship are praised to the heavens, even his efforts as an amateur composer are rated very highly indeed (Wilson's opinion that the princely compositions surely outclass those of Vaughan Williams did make me wonder whether the author's acquaintance with VW's oeuvre extends anywhere beyond Greensleeves...). But all these people are in fact only minor characters on Wilson's huge canvas, where the politicians dominate the scene. If there is any red thread discernible in his book, it is the political history of the Victorian era, including its economics, colonialism and warfare. Descriptions are sketchy and, I would guess, hard to follow at times if you weren't already familiar with the basics, but the characters are described very deftly and really come off the paper. Moreover, one of the most striking assets of this book is the way in which Wilson demonstrates to what extent Victorian politics influenced our present-day reality. He also shows how lust for power, lack of vision or mere parochialism and narrow-mindedness can result in decisions that have the most gruesome consequences in the longer run: one can think of more than a few present-day politicians you would want to read these passages!
I don't know who to advise this book to. Though it is not bad, it is too garbled to be of much use to somebody unfamiliar with the Victorian era. And those who have a deeper seated interest in this epoch will probably be better off buying books that deal in greater depth with subjects that are merely touched upon here. For instance, when it comes to sociology, culture and psychology Peter Gay's excellent cycle `The Bourgeois Experience` has rather more to offer.
Rating: 
Summary: Sweeping and Engrossing...
Review: This book was meant to be both standard and quirky history-telling, and the gambit works. It's written in highly themed chapters that sweep the reader along through the full Victorian era. All the well-known totems of the age are here, but so is a full cast of lesser-known and fascinating characters. All the famous, and infamous, episodes of Britain's ascendancy are well and imaginatively told.
Rating:
Summary: Tour de force
Review: This is a remarkable survey of the Victorian age. It covers all aspects of society and how things changed, both intellectually, artistically and materially. The books begins with Victoria's crowning and ends with her death. In between these two landmarks, the reader is treated to a cast of thousands which include Melbourne, Gladstone, Disraeli, Dickens, George Eliot, imperialism, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, Florence Nightingale, William Steed, Oscar Wilde, Christian Socialism, organized labor, the poor laws and William Morris.
Wilson is ever in command of his facts and materials and this book is probably one of the best researched single volumes on the period in some time. Wilson does more than present old wine in new bottles, but provides a 21st century perspective on the evolution of 19th century Britain.
Rating:
Summary: Tour de force
Review: This is a remarkable survey of the Victorian age. It covers all aspects of society and how things changed, both intellectually, artistically and materially. The books begins with Victoria's crowning and ends with her death. In between these two landmarks, the reader is treated to a cast of thousands which include Melbourne, Gladstone, Disraeli, Dickens, George Eliot, imperialism, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, Florence Nightingale, William Steed, Oscar Wilde, Christian Socialism, organized labor, the poor laws and William Morris.
Wilson is ever in command of his facts and materials and this book is probably one of the best researched single volumes on the period in some time. Wilson does more than present old wine in new bottles, but provides a 21st century perspective on the evolution of 19th century Britain.
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