High Victorian Culture

In fascinating detail. . . . [Morse] touches on many topics, yet keeps separate Victorians of very different cultural worlds. . . . Mid-Victorian Britain memorably presented. --ChoiceCovering the four decades from the accession to the throne by Queen Victoria in 1837 to her proclamation as Empress of India in 1877, High Victorian Culture is an in-depth study of Victorian literature and culture in its heyday. The age of Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, George Eliot, Tennyson, and Browning, it is a time of growing national self-confidence and of impressive industrial, scientific and literary achievements. It is an age also marked by dislocation and uncertainty, in which certain familiar landmarks of a society crumble and disappear. It is a world haunted, in a way, by its own strategic silences, as a society that is in many ways profoundly undemocratic finds itself driven by democratic rhetoric. It is a culture in which the freedom of speech and openness of discussion it claims to tout so highly can actually masks prospects of revelation deeply disturbing to some its finest cultural practioners. Extending his capacity for meshing the economic, political, religous, and artistic influences on literature to a new era, David Morse offers a new cultural perspective on the first four decades of the Victorian era.