ABSTRACT
To contemporaries, the third quarter of the nineteenth century seemed to be a period of prosperity, improvement and reform, an age of steady and irreversible progress. Progress was an integral part of intellectual life. Primary education and, with it, the extent of literacy and other basic intellectual skills, expanded considerably. This influence extended from older forms of intellectual life, such as philosophy, to the rapidly expanding scholarly fields of history and philology and to the still nascent social sciences. Artists and novelists, following these scientific and intellectual developments, offered more exact and detailed pictures of human life, attempting to capture it as it was, rather than in idealized and distorted for. Partisans of progress certainly envisaged a series of gradual improvements, but in the political sphere progress occurred in fits and starts, involved Great Power warfare and usually, although not always, stemming from this warfare, political upheaval. The ideal of smooth advance confronted a more disruptive reality.
