The Victorians

Apr 12, 2025 9:22 PM

Author:A.N. Wilson

The Victorians

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. 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? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

Reviews

The best single-volume work on the Victorian age yet written

—— Andrew Roberts , Evening Standard

Huge, entertaining volume of popular history

—— Sunday Times

A wonderful book

—— Sunday Telegraph

A masterpiece of popular history

—— Frank McLynn , Independent

Wilson is incapable of writing a dull sentence... This is the history of a vanished world brought to vibrant life

—— Beryl Bainbridge , Observer

The Victorians widens the focus of God's Funeral which was one of the best books of its year. This one, too, is to be devoured

—— Tom Stoppard , Sunday Telegraph

Reading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong

—— Clement Freud , Mail on Sunday

The Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age

—— Ian McIntyre , The Times

Rarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force

—— Robert McCrum , Observer

Wilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time

—— Literary Review

The Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers

—— The Independent

I can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic

—— John Sutherland , Mail on Sunday

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