• Gertrude Himmelfarb, who apparently knows everything there is to know about Victorian England, has been publishing invaluable books about the Victorians for longer than it would be polite for me to disclose. I prune my shelves ruthlessly, but five of her books have found permanent places there. Now I’ll be making room for a sixth.
The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale, 327 pp., $35) is one of those anthologies that somebody should have edited years ago, a book of such self-evident value that I can’t think why it’s only now being published. In it, Himmelfarb brings together essays by seventeen of the key figures in Victorian thought, among them Lord Acton, Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Cardinal Newman, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde. To this glittering assemblage of literary and intellectual luminaries she appends an introduction that not only supplies a historical context for their work but considers “the essay as genre” and its special significance in Victorian intellectual life:
The essay, even a substantial one, conveyed its ideas with an immediacy and vigor lacking in a book. In that shorter form, arguments were sharpened and controversy was heightened, so that the reader entered more readily into the mind and spirit of an author more knowledgeable and thoughtful than himself…. They were serious and learned, even scholarly, without being pedantic or abstruse. They were accessible to a relatively large audience because they were written by nonacademics for nonacademics, in a common language and reflecting common values.
Having edited a couple of anthologies myself, I know how hard it is to assemble a truly representative selection of writings on any subject, much less to write an introduction that makes collective sense of them all. Thus it is with an indissoluble blend of admiration and humility that I declare The Spirit of the Age to be as fine a book of its kind as could possibly be published. Not only does it cover all the bases in an absolute minimum of space, but Himmelfarb’s introduction is a miracle of clarity and concision. Never has the essence of Victorian thought been summed up so pithily:
To Carlyle, the tragedy of the age was that it was “at once destitute of faith and terrified of scepticism.” To Bulwer, it was the end of the “romantic age” and the beginning of a bleak utilitarianism. To Mill it was an age of “intellectual anarchy,” when the old virtues and moral authorities had died and new ones had not yet been born. Yet there was another aspect to the age that belied these dire diagnoses. So far from being “destitute of faith,” it was buoyed up by the Evangelical spirit that was the heir of Methodism…. If there is one word that is common to the whole of the Victorian age, it is earnestness—the religious earnestness of the early period transmuted into a moral and intellectual earnestness.
I was surprised—and pleased—to see that Himmelfarb has abridged some of the essays reprinted in The Spirit of the Age. Victorian earnestness and Victorian longwindedness (by our standards, not theirs) often went hand in hand, and by discreetly applying the blue pencil to certain of these pieces, they have been made significantly more readable. Himmelfarb apologizes in the introduction for her “temerity in doing what a Victorian editor might not have done,” but I applaud her for it. So, I suspect, will you.
