ABSTRACT
Historians have been attempting to provide overviews of Victorian Britain for a long time. One of the first and most influential of these works, published in 1936, was G. M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. Born in 1882, Young was himself a Victorian. He was what we would today call a “cultural historian,” most interested in Victorians’ mindset and beliefs. He argued that the Victorians shared certain key assumptions, beliefs, and habits of mind. These included curiosity, a willingness to question assumptions, and a vigorous but “disinterested intelligence.” Young’s Portrait was in many ways a retort to the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury group’s snide criticisms of the Victorians. Perhaps the most important of these critiques was Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), an attack on Victorian values and hypocrisy that in some ways announced the definitive end of the Victorian era. However, although Young celebrated the age Strachey savaged, and his early and mid-Victorian periods saw England (not Britain) grow into a “rounded and solid culture,” his later Victorian period was one of decline from basic decency into faddish vulgarity.
