'The Victorians are still with us. This is not a whimsical statement, intended to suggest that the shades of Prince Consort or Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Dan Leno are still to be discovered floating in the night air if we emphasize sufficiently with their memory or purpose. Rather, the Victorians are still with us because the world they created is still here unchanged.'
In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age, AN Wilson describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being. The capitalist world came into being because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, actual politicians. We meet them in the pages of this book.
Here are the lofty and famous Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli - and here too are the poor and the obscure - doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa.
