ABSTRACT
Walter Bagehot is a standing temptation to indulge in selective Victorianism. The deftness of his style obscures certain major omissions in knowledge and interest: his ignorance of the United States, his complacent superiority towards French society and letters, his failure to understand the importance of the party system. In reading Bagehot one is apt to forget the crudity and fanaticism which existed in mid-Victorian England and the deadening limitations on so many lives. By the beginning of the ‘fifties England was becoming a little tired of being “improved” and annoyed with the improvers. England might be a little in the position of a man taking his breath after climbing a steep hill but he was a man determined to press on and only slowing down for a minute or two, taking stock of the landscape.
