Why read The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870?

Book cover of The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870

Book description

"It is now forty years," Walter Houghton writes, "since Lytton Strachey decided that we knew too much about the Victorian era to view its culture as a whole." Recently the tide has turned and the Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic "period pieces," critical and biographical works, and extensive…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Adrian Brettle

Author

I love this book because nothing more perfectly proves the historian’s adage that the past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. Houghton understands the importance of mid-nineteenth century Great Britain’s cultural, economic, and social ascendancy in determining and understanding American attitudes from work to play, attitudes to class, race, taste in literature, and so on.

The ambition of wealth and power, which in the eighteenth century had destabilized the natural God-given order of things, was now seen as respectable and to be pursued. Weakness and poverty were now a source of shame and weakness. Above all, Houghton…

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