High Minds The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain
Simon Heffer
Cornerstone 896pp £30
Here is a familiar story, told in a most unfamiliar way. The story is familiar from many books about the ‘age of reform/improvement’ and others of that ilk. While there is much in it which has been historical knowledge for at least two generations, I was quite affected to find Mr Heffer using Lytton Strachey as a sparring partner in his warm-up pages – just like my tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge 60 years ago.
Heffer’s vision is clear and uncomplicated, free from a usual historian’s diffidence about the beginning and end of this ‘reforming’ age and how to explain it. For him it began with the ‘hungry forties’ and ended about 1880. It was driven by the anxious, high-minded discourse of notable Victorians. Heffer expounds on this vision of Englishmen wrestling with the manifold challenges of their troubled country, but rather passes over what else in the world challenged them, such as foreign policy, Empire and Ireland. His story is wholly domestic. Very reasonably, he admires how those Victorians made the Britain of 1880 in many ways a better land to live in – and a more democratic one – than it had been 50 years before; also, he asserts, a more ‘secularised’ one. With reforming movements and improvements already made or rooted before the 1840s, he has little concern, with one all-important exception. That exception is the key to his belief (if I understand him correctly) that the statesmen he has chosen to study breathed a unique moral atmosphere, traceable back to Thomas Arnold, the renowned headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841.
Arnold’s name must appear in any historian’s list of eminent opinion-forming Victorians. Heffer lists the usual suspects, including Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, J.A. Froude, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold (the great headmaster’s son), Samuel Smiles, Thomas Huxley (the ardent supporter of Darwin and arguably the Richard Dawkins of his day), J.K. Stephen, Samuel Butler; but he brings into company with them politicians – Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, Shaftesbury and Gladstone chief among them – and a scattering of exemplary Victorians of moral altitudes, ranging from Angela Burdett-Coutts through Joseph Paxton, Charles Dickens and Henry Cole to Thomas Holloway. Much space is given to Prince Albert, whose high-mindedness has never been questioned. But Heffer has mined the royal archives for evidence to clinch the case that, once he had given up trying to share his wife’s royal duties, he did a great deal of good and in good company, too: a model of public spirited high-mindedness.
This big book has a heavy biographical weighting of familiar figures. But the way the author presents his dramatis personae and their achievements is all his own. Those achievements, whether embodied in the statute book, or in iron, glass, brick and stone, only materialise out of lengthy expositions of their enactors’ states of mind, as disclosed either by their biographers or by themselves, in their own words. An enormous proportion of the book’s nearly 900 pages – my guess is about one third – is given to citations and reported speech from their publications, letters, evidence to royal commissions and, above all, performances in Parliament.
This is pretty daunting stuff. Peel, Gladstone and their like were no stand-up comics. (Disraeli of course was, but being of low mind in this interpretation, he is little cited.) Heffer is likely to find appreciative followers among those who like a good leisurely read, who do not already know much about the 19th century and who take naturally to a view of it de haut en bas and who are pleased to have some of its most prominent men and, towards the end, women presented with dignity and respect. However, for the better informed reader, they may find these pages heavy going and, especially in their ventures into the region of ‘intellectual history’, perhaps a tad oversimplified for their liking. As for young people, should any such venture within reading distance of so formidably large a volume, they may blench at the sunless vistas of plain prose and long paragraphs, unenlivened by ‘boxes’, pictures or tables of prime ministers and other holders of high office. There is a bibliography of the books that Heffer has used and in what editions; a credit to his honesty, but less helpful as a guide to further reading.
Geoffrey Best's books include Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-75 (Flamingo, 2008). He is a Fellow of the British Academy
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