Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain

Victorian Britain is often considered as the high point of "laissez-faire," the place and the time when people were most "free" to make their own lives without the aid or interference of the State. This book, by leading historians of nineteenth-century state and society, asks to what extent that was true and, to the extent that it was, how it worked.

Educated at Oxford and Harvard universities, Peter Mandler has taught British history on both sides of the Atlantic and since 2001 at Cambridge University, where he is Reader in Modern British History and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. His most recent book is a history of the idea of the English national character, 'from Burke to Blair'. He is currently working on the intellectual history of 'national identity' and its precursors and is co-director of a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on Victorian attitudes to past, present and future, 'Abandoning the Past', run by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. He has been honorary secretary of the Royal Historical Society and is currently co-editor of the Historical Journal.