Perhaps one might be forgiven for supposing that not very much more could usefully be written about the life and society of Charles Dickens (1812‐1870). He was certainly a literary epitome of the entirety of the Victorian Age in England. He expressed, very vividly and diversely, its extraordinary vitality, vigour and variety, creating in that process many assorted caricatures of his times, particularly in and around London. Historians may still, perhaps, protest that Dickens was an overflowing sentimentalist, who for all his literary creations overemphasized the place of the poor, without also formulating any plans for their amelioration. He exhibited too, typically Victorian attitudes towards both death and social inequality. Humphrey House, even amidst the Second World War, gave us an instructive picture: “Dickens made out of Victorian England a complete world, with a life and vigour and idiom of its own, quite unlike any other world there has ever been” (House, 1941).
This present volume, however, contrives – without much effort at diversionary originality – to extricate out of the world of Charles Dicken’s yet another instructive and evocative book. Its eight very enlightening chapters portray Victorian society: its merits of composite Classical culture, its serious deficiencies in the gross inequality between rich and poor, and in particular, the dominance of London microcosm of it all. The 282 pages are largely made up of a huge harvest of suitable extracts from various writers. These include Henry Mayhew (on the London poor), Elizabeth Gaskell and Engels (on the industrial classes), William Cobbett and Francis Kilvert (on rural life) and Carlyle, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold (on art and culture). Tennyson – that essential poet of the Victorian period – dwelt somewhat precariously between complacency and pessimism, regarding its future and its potentiality. For him, at any rate, it was “an awful moment of transition” between elitism and democracy, privilege and equality, and so, indeed, in substance did Gladstone see it, receding as it was, during his final old age (1894‐1898).
We must find here, a rich and discerning picture of the enormous diversity that made up Victorian England. Pride in nationhood from even the American R.W. Emerson, consciousness of wealth from W.M. Thackeray, the confusion of faith and doubt from George Eliot and H.P. Lyte, the lingering rural life of William Howitt, and the cult of sea bathing by Frances Kilvert. This most welcome and wholly admirable volume has cast its net with a most assiduous industry across a daunting range of suitable writers in both prose and poetry. The result is a book of undoubted and enduring importance for all students of the perplexing enigma, in terms of both culture and social organization that was Victorian England.
The author, R.E. Pritchard, is a former lecturer at Keele University in English literature. Since 1992 he has published books chiefly about the Renaissance literature of Elizabethan England. One can only admire and commend his latest work – albeit about the very different world of Charles Dicken’s – for its comprehensiveness, its diligent search for source materials, high and low, and its insight into both art and science, wealth and poverty, in Victorian England. This is, indeed, a most worthy and invaluable book, for all serious students of its important subject.
