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The early Victorians, 1832-1851
'The Early Victorians' shows that the much vaunted stability of the era was based on a network of institutions that supported the dominance of the elite and the subordination of the lower orders by inculcating habits of deference, hierarchical assumptions, and acceptance of the class system as 'natural.
195 pages, Hardcover
First published August 11, 1998
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About the author
J.F.C. Harrison
33 booksJohn Fletcher Clews Harrison (born 1921) is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex. A specialist on Victorian Britain, he served as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War afterwards teaching at the University of Leeds, then the University of Wisconsin before joining the faculty at the University of Sussex.
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March 15, 2015"I know what England is. Old England is a fine place for the rich, but the Lord help the poor."
This is a short book covering the brief period of time between the 1832 Reform Act and the Great Exhibition of 1851. It feels like an extended essay, rather than a comprehensive treatment of the period. It doesn't have the wide ranging feel of the second volume (Mid Victorian Britain) in the series and, this is acknowledged in the introduction, you wonder about the differences between England and the Celtic Fringe, and then between urban and rural areas, areas with different economic specialisms, and then finally you wonder if it is at all possible to give a reasonable summary of the state of the country, or whether like some average covering a complex situation, more is lost in the attempt to give an overview than can be gained. However Harrison deserves credit precisely because he constantly draws your attention to these local differences, and you are left with the thought that knowledge of the period could be transformed with a couple of dozen students each carrying out a couple of decades of further research.
One of the strengths of the book was that the author showed that stress on self-help was the other side of movements, political and religious, for reform and change. Both were reactions to the massive changes caused by industrialisation and more modern patterns of work. I wonder if the growth and social importance of fox hunting was the response of the upper classes to those changes, creating an activity that stressed a traditional social order (even as it was being broken up in the countryside) and rural over industrial concerns ?
There is a nice paragraph in the middle of the book that sums up one invented tradition erected as a bulwark to block off the changing social landscape from view that focuses on Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (with the playwright's works amended to make them suitable for family reading). Then Edwin Landseer's paintings are nicely contrasted with the role of prostitution in early Victorian society. But, and this leads back to the problem mentioned above, with estimates varying between eight thousand and eighty thousand prostitutes working in London the reality of those times remains elusive. The suggestion from Acton that prostitution was a transitory state is fascinating and suggests more questions, but that's the nature of a book like this. Equally the case of George Hudson, the rise and fall of a speculating railway magnate, begs for further investigation - this time into corporate governance and business history in this period - this is a theme that is elaborated in British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century. The amount of verbiage spouted about the vim and vigour of Victorian enterprise is still in inverse proportion to what is actually known about it. However we can be certain that the self made man, like Dickens' Mr Bounderby in Hard Times was the product of a self made society. A society that preferred to look away from its day to day realities and concentrate on an imagined, ideal past or bucolic versions of the countryside or the colonies.
This is a short book full of promising flavours, enough as an introduction, but also tempting the reader along towards further discoveries that lurk (hopefully) within the covers of more detailed studies.
This is a short book covering the brief period of time between the 1832 Reform Act and the Great Exhibition of 1851. It feels like an extended essay, rather than a comprehensive treatment of the period. It doesn't have the wide ranging feel of the second volume (Mid Victorian Britain) in the series and, this is acknowledged in the introduction, you wonder about the differences between England and the Celtic Fringe, and then between urban and rural areas, areas with different economic specialisms, and then finally you wonder if it is at all possible to give a reasonable summary of the state of the country, or whether like some average covering a complex situation, more is lost in the attempt to give an overview than can be gained. However Harrison deserves credit precisely because he constantly draws your attention to these local differences, and you are left with the thought that knowledge of the period could be transformed with a couple of dozen students each carrying out a couple of decades of further research.
One of the strengths of the book was that the author showed that stress on self-help was the other side of movements, political and religious, for reform and change. Both were reactions to the massive changes caused by industrialisation and more modern patterns of work. I wonder if the growth and social importance of fox hunting was the response of the upper classes to those changes, creating an activity that stressed a traditional social order (even as it was being broken up in the countryside) and rural over industrial concerns ?
There is a nice paragraph in the middle of the book that sums up one invented tradition erected as a bulwark to block off the changing social landscape from view that focuses on Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (with the playwright's works amended to make them suitable for family reading). Then Edwin Landseer's paintings are nicely contrasted with the role of prostitution in early Victorian society. But, and this leads back to the problem mentioned above, with estimates varying between eight thousand and eighty thousand prostitutes working in London the reality of those times remains elusive. The suggestion from Acton that prostitution was a transitory state is fascinating and suggests more questions, but that's the nature of a book like this. Equally the case of George Hudson, the rise and fall of a speculating railway magnate, begs for further investigation - this time into corporate governance and business history in this period - this is a theme that is elaborated in British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century. The amount of verbiage spouted about the vim and vigour of Victorian enterprise is still in inverse proportion to what is actually known about it. However we can be certain that the self made man, like Dickens' Mr Bounderby in Hard Times was the product of a self made society. A society that preferred to look away from its day to day realities and concentrate on an imagined, ideal past or bucolic versions of the countryside or the colonies.
This is a short book full of promising flavours, enough as an introduction, but also tempting the reader along towards further discoveries that lurk (hopefully) within the covers of more detailed studies.
October 25, 2025
Good overview of the early Victorian period. There are not any great revelations, but it is a decent synthesis.
August 19, 2022
Early Victorian Britain is one of the books that clarifies so many popular assumptions of history that are based on how late Victorian ended up publicizing itself. Dickens doesn't make any sense until you learn that the New Poor Law of 1834 was a reaction to a rather generous social welfare system that made poverty tolerable enough until 1834 and Dickens was reacting to the crippling horror that the Tory government had just created a few years ago. Harrison does a good, concise job of taking in the diversity of economic and cultural factors, the money pouring in from the colonies, and how people experienced all this on the ground. Early Victorian Britain is well worth reading, and it's short. Highly recommend.
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