The Victorians

“The ‘global village’ is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? A.N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age. The capitalist world came into being because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, actual politicians. We meet them in the pages of this book. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw – here they are. Here are the lofty and famous – Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli – and here too are the poor and the obscure – doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa.”