Newman Studies Journal

Sweeping grand narrative history, with an unapologetic emphasis on high politics, which characterises this masterful, highly readable, and nicely illustrated study by one of Britain's most eminent historians, Sir David Cannadine, is no longer in academic fashion. In recent years it has been rarely found outside the confines of such multi-volume projects as The New Oxford History of England series, to the authors of the "long" nineteenth-century volumes of which, notably Boyd Hilton's A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (2006), Cannadine acknowledges his debt in an appended "Note on Further Reading." In fact, while in no way derivative, Cannadine recognizes that he is contributing to a rich literature. Pride of place in the genre must go to G. M. Young's brilliant and evocative Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936) hailed "as the greatest single study of the age in any language" and by Simon Schama as "an immortal classic." To this can be added G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1922) and Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement: 1783–1867 (1959), while the more recent confident overviews of Victorian society by Simon Heffer are a worthy model.

In an age when specialist or niche studies of concepts like the history of race, gender, the emotions and the senses, and material culture, each of which have their due place, have become commonplace, it is refreshing to find a historian tackling a broad canvas and panorama, while not losing sight of the local and particular. Nor in his "big picture" macro-study approach does Cannadine overlook the importance in themselves of race and gender issues. For example, he discusses gender inequality both in relation to employment, marriage, law, and the franchise, while race is treated in relation to slavery, the colonies, and the rise of racial hierarchical theories based on a misapplication of Darwin's ideas concerning evolution.

Cannadine's perspective tends to privilege the state and corridors of power, and his "top down" high political, parliamentary, and electoral focus (every general election gets a mention, as do many of the budgets) means that the [End Page 161] great nineteenth-century statesmen—Pitt, the Earl of Liverpool, Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, the Earl of Derby, Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury—loom large. Nonetheless, Cannadine is no less interesting and perceptive in his analysis of the "condition of England" and also of wider cultural, intellectual, social and economic trends, covering the arts, music and literature, architecture and design, the sciences, transport and the railways. For example, generous space is given to the building and funding of the Crystal Palace and Great Exhibition of 1851 and its iconic significance.

The title "Victorious Century" in itself captures a triumphalist Whig interpretation of nineteenth-century British history in terms of expanding democracy, rapid population growth, industrial expansion, colonial and imperial extension, all appearing to help shape a British global hegemony by the end of the period. The book opens with the Act of Union with Ireland (1800) and Britain's struggle with Napoleonic France, culminating in Wellington's triumph at the Battle of Waterloo (1815), a victory aided by an increasingly efficient apparatus of tax collection and public borrowing. The Radical challenge and popular agitation of the late 1810s and 1820s, the rise of Liberal Toryism and political realignments, along with the financial and banking crises of that period, are expertly analyzed, leading in to a reassessment of the 1832 Reform Act. That apparently seismic political milestone is shown to have been hedged in with restrictions and is claimed by Cannadine as being most noteworthy for inaugurating a two-party parliamentary system linked to class interests with the working-class remaining disenfranchised and also becoming subject to a harsh new Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) bearing the hallmarks of Benthamite Utilitarianism. Cannadine shows how the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s struggled in vain to enfranchise the workers and that it was only in 1867 with a Second Reform Act that "respectable...