Being Victorian

Writers and poets, academics and art critics, mathematicians and experimental scientists, churchmen and politicians, women of strong opinions gather for a summer weekend in the 1870s. Is it real, or is it a fantasy?

One thing's sure: their debates—about life's aims, rural and urban living, love and money, civilization and belief, the social framework, the past, the present and the future—take us to the heart of the Victorian dream and its reality: the idea that their society exemplified 'Progress'.

What did 'Progress' mean? Were things (and which things) getting better? What did 'better' mean? And for whom?

The history of the world before the Victorians, from Aberdeen to Africa, showed a particular form of equality for almost everyone: an equality of poverty and no prospects, with kindness often in short supply. Victorians wanted to change that world, thought they were changing it, did change it. They did it in a human way: a mélange of muddle, vision, certainty, doubt, too slow for many, too fast for some. Yet their changes were decisive both for creating the modern world, but also for revealing the dilemmas attached to mass living in urban, technological societies, as well as the moral flaws in imposing one civilization's or one person's beliefs on another.

Most remarkably of all, the upheaval in making major transitions in every area of life, which produced revolutions and violence across Europe, in the Americas and in Asia, was carried out—at least in Britain itself—almost entirely peacefully.

The past will always be a foreign country for those unwilling to engage with its people. Whether viewing the lives of rulers or the ruled, Being Victorian corrects innumerable preconceptions.