Gertrude Himmelfarb, editor
The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays.
Yale University Press, 336 pages, $35

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has been writing important books on Victorian life and mores for over fifty years. In 1952 she published Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics. Her latest offering is an anthology of nonfictional readings from the period, ranging from Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times,” published in 1829, two years after Victoria came to the throne, to T. H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” from 1893, eight years before she died. The collection illustrates Himmelfarb’s view that the spirit of the Victorian age defined itself as much in its books and ideas as in political battles and societal strife.

That said, this is a historian’s anthology, not a literary critic’s one. Walter Bagehot and Lord Acton take a bow; Walter Pater does not. Ruskin checks in with “The Roots of Honour,” an essay on—or, more accurately, against—political economy that first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine under Thackeray’s editorship rather than with the earlier bravura style of “The Nature of Gothic” or the later Lear-like ragings of “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” Novelists, when they get a look-in, do so from less familiar vantage points: Thackeray from his anatomy of snobs, which first appeared in Punch; Eliot in the Westminster Review critically examining an early example of an evangelical demagogue; Dickens, writing for the Examiner before he began his own journals Household Words and All the