ABSTRACT
Though the word ‘Victorian’ lives on in the vocabulary of the late twentieth century, to outface historians with a permanence not unlike that which by 1887 the Queen had begun to acquire for herself, historians rightly persist in their academically reputable dislike of dividing English history in accordance with the accession and death of its monarchs. And almost all are agreed that, at some point which they hesitate to specify, and in a variety of ways they are uncertain how to elucidate, the late-Victorian age had characteristics profoundly unlike those of early-and mid-Victorian times. That most felicitous of writers on the Victorian age, Sir George Young, clearly found the Victorians distasteful long before he had fully reached the terminal date of his study, asserting that, whereas he found the early-and mid-Victorian public ‘so alert, so masculine and so responsible’, their late-Victorian (and Edwardian) successors ‘were ceasing to be a ruling or a reasonable stock’. They were become ‘easily excited, easily satisfied’, and guilty of remissness ‘of intelligence, character and purpose’. More cautious in declaring the scope of his own later study, The Making of Victorian England, George Kitson Clark goes so far as to
describe the year 1886 as ‘a turning point in political history’, but after looking forward a few pages later to the survival of great wealth among the nobility in 1901, shelters himself from the late Victorians two pages thereafter behind an analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Two recent economic and social historians stop short in the 1880s.1 Another well-known historian writes on The Age of Improvement and appears, no doubt unintentionally, to accept Sir George Young’s despondent view of the late Victorians by ending his volume in 1867.2 With a fine disregard for the earliest economic historians (and perhaps for the meaning of words) two joint authors of another work entitle it The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880.3 Basil Willey’s Nineteenth Century Studies studiously avoids reference to any writer after Matthew Arnold. Raymond Williams, in Culture and Society 17801950, writes with somewhat more assurance, ‘The temper which the adjective Victorian is useful to describe is virtually finished in the 1880s’, but then retreats into the uncertainty of most other writers by lamely describing the years from 1880 to 1914 as an ‘Interregnum’.
