ABSTRACT
Victorian England was a teeming society. For its more fortunate men and women, life brimmed with industries and shops, popular entertainments and learned journals, the polished woods of the display cases in the new museums, the racks of news pouring in from foreign lands. Many of the 21 million people in Great Britain at mid-centuryperhaps three million of mature years in the more comfortable classes2-had the time and the means to choose (if they wished) what they wanted to pay attention to, what strands to listen for in the rich cacophony of Victorian life. Should one learn Italian? Work for the poor? Take up marine biology? Follow Latin American business and politics? Or should one follow the history of the British Empire itself?
