1850s
A01=Camplin J
A01=Jamie Camplin
Anti-Slavery
Author_Camplin J
Author_Jamie Camplin
Building Democracy
Category=JBCC9
Category=NH
Category=NHT
Category=NHTK
Civic Pride
Disraeli and Gladstone
Education for All
Englishness
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Great Inventors
Industrial Revolution
Inventing Celebrities
Law reform
Making the Global Economy
Modern Banking
Modern Political Parties
Modern Travel
Nations and Empires
Origins of the Labour Party
Public Service
Scientific Discovery
Self-Help
the Crimean War
the European Balance of Power
the Power of Reading
Tribes
Victorians
Where the Modern World Began
Women's Rights
Women’s Rights
Product details
- ISBN 9781917458283
- Weight: 870g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 11 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 melange 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.
Jamie Camplin took a double first in history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the mid-1960s after winning a place when he was sixteen. After a period working in industry and considering a political career, he changed direction and was successively Editorial Director and Managing Director (1979–2013) at Thames & Hudson. He is the author of The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England, the historical novel 1914: The King Must Die and, most recently, Books Do Furnish a Painting (with Maria Ranauro).
