Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This book is a collection of essays that address various intellectual, spiritual and political crises that arose in Victorian Britain, and how the Victorians dealt with them. The first four essays are on various "proto-Victorians", including Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus. The next six are on John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Leslie Stephen, Walter Bagehot, James Froude, and John Buchan. These essays are on various subjects and are not biographical. The remaining four essays are entitled, "The Victorian Ethos", "Victorian Angst", "Varieties of Social Darwinism", and "Politics and Ideology".

As with other writings of Gertrude Himmelfarb that I have read, this book is somewhat dry. However, the author always takes fascinating looks into her topics, and provides the reader with a great understanding into what Victorianism really was about. As an aside, in the book I found the essays on Malthus and Acton absorbing, along with the essay "Politics and Ideology", which was an excellent look at the Reform Act of 1867.