Hating the Past

But that hasn’t stopped scholars from trying. Libraries are filled with attempts to capture the nineteenth century, from Sir Charles Petrie’s “The Victorians” to Anthony Wood’s “Nineteenth Century Britain: 1815-1914.” Fascinating and readable studies exist on a dizzying number of topics: the Industrial Revolution, technological innovations (particularly the railway), the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Irish famine, the Chartist movement, the rise of the newspaper, the flowering of Romantic literature, the philosophy of Mill and Marx, and the crisis brought on by the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”

A.N. Wilson’s “The Victorians” is the latest addition to this literature. Perhaps predictably, it doesn’t make a very distinguished contribution to the field. Modestly admitting his lack of expertise in the preface, Wilson, a novelist and biographer, considers his book a “portrait of an age” rather than a history, and he takes as his model G.M. Young’s 1938 “Victorian England”–a quaint and deeply nostalgic account of the “waning of a great civilization.”

Wilson’s version of the Victorians is anything but quaint, however. At over seven hundred pages, divided into six parts that range from early Victorian times to the Boer War, “The Victorians” is far more ambitious than its author suggests. Indeed, Wilson’s book is highly contentious, either implicitly or explicitly intended to supplant previous interpretations.

Regrettably though, Wilson is not a very illuminating guide to the British past. He lacks detachment, both emotional and intellectual, from his material, and too often he gives way to some expressive outburst. Look, for instance, at his discussion of the Irish famine: “It is all so horrible that one cannot and need not exaggerate the suffering of the hungry and the callousness of their governors.” This kind of hand-wringing contributes little to our understanding.

Related to Wilson’s emotionalism is his tendency to moralize. I do not know precisely what it means to hate an abstract group of people who lived more than a century ago, but it would not be inaccurate to say that Wilson hates the Victorians. Here is his conclusion to the first part of the book: “From here on the Victorian story becomes an alarming triumph song, Great Britain growing richer and more powerful by the decade, coarsening in the process, and leaving the historian with a sense that only in its dissentient voices is redemption found.”

It is unclear why the historian would be looking for “redemption” in the first place. But, progressive-minded as he is, Wilson cannot help but be offended by the Victorians. He sneers at every aristocrat of the day, while bestowing a sympathetic word on every liberal or socialist who wanders by. The Victorians as a result seem a deeply reactionary people, which they weren’t. Seen in historical context, they were among the most humanitarian and liberal people on earth in the nineteenth century. In any century, for that matter. The Victorian commitment to, say, the abolishment of slavery counts little for Wilson. They weren’t enlightened enough, he wants to say, and so he dismisses them.

Worse, Wilson’s lack of detachment at times leads to baldly incorrect interpretation. This is the case in his treatment of the Indian Mutiny, of which he writes: “Even if 1857 was not quite an independence war, it was much, much more than a ‘mutiny’–a word which not merely, inaccurately, suggests that violence was restricted to the military, but also begs every moral question by assuming the legitimacy of British ‘rule.'” What follows is the claim that the Indian Mutiny was a revolutionary, progressive move-ment caused by oppressive British imperialists.

But as the critic Benjamin Schwarz notes, “Many local factors sparked the rebellion, but it was primarily a reactionary movement that drew its leadership and greatest support from the traditional, hierarchical elements in Indian society–above all the dispossessed princes and landlords–that had suffered most under British rule.” Wilson sees that the Indian peasantry united with the landlords in the mutiny, but he does not observe how profoundly illiberal this was, especially in the eyes of the reform-minded British.

There’s little to say in favor of “The Victorians,” historically inadequate as it is, but it does have the virtue of demonstrating the limitations of the expressive, personal approach to history that is currently in fashion. As a courtesy to readers, impartiality might make a welcome return to letters.

Stephen Barbara, a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, works as a freelance writer in Connecticut.