Gertrude Himmelfarb, like so many Americans, is appalled by crime, drug addiction, illiteracy, juvenile delinquency, illegitimacy and welfare dependency. The solution she proposes, in this follow-up to her much-praised On Looking into the Abyss, is as simple as it is radical - and has the further advantage of solid historical substantiation. We must look back on the Victorians with open minds; they must cease to irk us. And then, Himmelfarb hopes,...

"Where "Victorianism" once conjured up an image of smugness, hypocrisy, and mindlessness, it now suggests quite the reverse: an age of high intellectual, moral, and spiritual tension, in which the typical problems of modernity were posed in their most acute forms .... The "Victorian ethos" describes the transmutation of a religious creed into a social ethic--an ethic providing for more mobility, flexibility, and variety than is generally supposed....

In these perceptive essays, the highly regarded historian Gertrude Himmelfarb critically examines the cultural and ideological fashions of contemporary America. She analyzes the intellectual arrogance and spiritual impoverishment at the heart of such current academic movements in history, literature, and philosophy as structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism - and shows how they have led to the belittling of one of the great tragedies of...

Discusses the views of great thinkers from 1750 to 1850--including Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Friedrich Engels--toward the condition of the poor in England.

"None of the stereotypes of Victorian England - narrow-minded, inhibited, moralistic, complacent - prepares us for the vitality, variety, and above all extraordinary quality of intellectual life displayed in this volume of essays. Selected and annotated by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of Victorian thought, the writings address a wide range of subjects - religion, politics, history, science, art, socialism, and feminism - by eminent...