Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition

By Gertrude Himmelfarb

Book Overview

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. Gertrude Himmelfarb's distinguished piece of intellectual history explores these tensions and problems with sympathy, candor, and critical subtlety. Victorian Minds is a study of intellectuals in crisis and of ideologies in transition, rendered with an elegance of style and thought. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of 19th-century England as immediately. ... The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship"-Lionel Trilling. "Precise and discriminating ... an exemplary study of the 19th century and a superb introduction to the 20th."-Robert A. Nisbet. "Miss Himmelfarb is a writer to whom the organization of ideas into intricate shapes and patterns is imperative, and like many of her subjects-and comparatively few modern intellectuals-she is capable of poised and meaningful generalization."- A. S. Byatt.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630770
• ISBN13: 9781566630771
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Length: 418 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.1" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating

This book is a collection of essays that address various intellectual, spiritual and political crises that arose in Victorian Britain, and how the Victorians dealt with them. The first four essays are on various "proto-Victorians", including Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus. The next six are on John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Leslie Stephen, Walter Bagehot, James Froude, and John Buchan. These essays are on various subjects and are not biographical. The remaining four essays are entitled, "The Victorian Ethos", "Victorian Angst", "Varieties of Social Darwinism", and "Politics and Ideology".As with other writings of Gertrude Himmelfarb that I have read, this book is somewhat dry. However, the author always takes fascinating looks into her topics, and provides the reader with a great understanding into what Victorianism really was about. As an aside, in the book I found the essays on Malthus and Acton absorbing, along with the essay "Politics and Ideology", which was an excellent look at the Reform Act of 1867.