One of the pleasures of this immensely readable volume is its unapologetic emphasis on high politics, a historical fashion so old it’s new again ... Cannadine’s attention to parliamentary politics also lets him unspool the wranglings over Irish home rule, easily the most divisive issue in later 19th-century politics, and replete with legacies and lessons for the age of Brexit. Another satisfaction lies in Cannadine’s polymathic command of the cultural life of the period ... Cannadine has pulled off the hat-trick of commanding erudition, original interpretation and graceful writing.
Much of the narrative frame concerns high politics, and rightly so. A book like this one is particularly valuable in an age when history undergraduates often startle their teachers by their ignorance of basic facts ... In Cannadine’s lucid account there is the occasional slip (the 1833 Irish Church Temporalities Act suppressed 10 bishoprics, not 18). And there’s one subject that he deals with cursorily at the very end, but that was of the greatest importance in the second part of the century: the growth of organized games. He mentions the publication of Mill’s Utilitarianism in 1863, but not another and surely more important event that year, the meeting at a London pub that drew up a common code for association football. As A. J. P. Taylor said, 'By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished' — words that may be given further force this summer.
Mr. Cannadine presents the liberal spirit of progress as the hero of his tale. It guided Britain through conflicts, social disparities and political transitions while pointing toward a better society. Other chroniclers might have taken more notice of the fact that such progress had significant trade-offs, but he tells his own story persuasively and exceedingly well.
Victorious Century does not suggest new historical interpretations of 19th-century Britain. Its interest lies rather in the author’s wide range and his emphasis on contrasts — an emphasis announced at the outset by his epigraph from Dickens: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Readers following the progress of Brexit will note much of interest, not least Britain’s old-established resistance to involvement in European issues, the Irish status quo that is now complicating negotiations about customs duties, and the rifts in the Conservative Party caused by differences over protectionism that are once again surfacing in the debates between a 'hard' and 'soft' Brexit.
The masterful political narrative tends to crowd out the rest of Cannadine’s knowledge: polymathic cultural references are skimmed over, while discussions of social, economic and gender evolutions and revolutions seem frustratingly brief. Cannadine skilfully shows how the men of government (and of industry, religion and more) were 'riding tigers that they could never fully control', and whose destination they rarely knew. Yet the 'tigers', and what they devoured, receive less attention than those atop them. This is not, however, a history with narrow horizons, and the marshalling of material across a huge breadth is greatly impressive.
Mr Cannadine seems right to argue that pessimism is the key to understanding the Victorians, with the 1880s and 1890s marking the high tide of both their arrogance and their fears ... Mr Cannadine offers a comprehensive analysis, in particular, of high politics. Some of the big characters of the age are lost—Dickens and Brunel are somewhat absent—but he knits together the often diverging grand imperial, national and social histories with skill.
It is, in the first place, curiously old-fashioned. In what is necessarily a highly condensed work of synthesis, most space is devoted to high politics ... it is an approach that tends to minimize the influence of ideas and culture on political dynamics. Cannadine is of course aware of extraneous forces, such as class and religion, but he is more interested in 'top-down' factors than in 'bottom-up' ones ... Second, Victorious Century is a belated example of what Herbert Butterfield called 'the Whig school of history.' That is, he believes not only in progress, but in the right of posterity to condescend toward the past ... That seems to this reader a curious attitude for a historian to take towards the staggering achievements of that era ... It is as if he cannot quite forgive the British for preserving their traditions and inventing new ones, for hanging on to as much as possible of their way of life, even as their world was being turned upside down.
There is a danger of getting bogged down in the details, but diligent readers will find plenty of enlightenment here ... Inevitably, the empire’s pre-eminence would buckle under its own far-flung reach. Ever adept, Cannadine shows us why and how it happened. Dense but satisfying history of a time when 'Britons were prodigiously energetic, industrious and creative, even as they were also in many ways a flawed and fallible people.'
Cannadine’s account is solid and informative, but it lacks anything remotely bold or provocative, or anything that complicates the book’s central thesis of the remarkable stability of British political institutions compared to their continental counterparts.
