Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
Victorian Swish
By Noel Annan
For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age
by Margaret Drabble
Seabury Press, 144 pp., $8.95
George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation
by Alan Mintz
Harvard University Press, 193 pp., $11.00
The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture
by Bruce Haley
Harvard University Press, 296 pp., $15.00
The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After
by lan Gibson
Duckworth (London), 364 pp., £15.00
There is something to be said for history that is not written by historians. One of the most original short histories of England ever written was by G.K. Chesterton. Margaret Drabble, who was once a moving amateur actress in her brilliant career as a student at Cambridge, and later made her name as a novelist, has not only the talents to reflect about the Victorian age but fewer inhibitions than professionals. In fact it is refreshing to read a piece of good old-fashioned Whig history written as if Namier and Butterfield had never anathematized it. She wants to tell her readers—she teaches at an adult education college in London—how the past became the present; how much we owe to the Victorians our notions of family life, tolerance, education—and advertising. Then it was that chairs became comfy. Then it was that many of the objects we use today, such as typewriters, were invented, then it was that the familiar tunnels and bridges were built, the houses we live in, the monuments we pass were erected. Then it was that the people gradually got the vote, and the movement for women's rights began.
Review, 7705 words
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