The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (Yale Paperbound, Y-99)

“It is now forty years,” Walter Houghton writes, “since Lytton Strachey decided that we knew too much about the Victorian era to view its culture as a whole.” Recently the tide has turned and the Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic “period pieces,” critical and biographical works, and extensive studies of their age, but the Victorian mind itself remains blurred for us―a bundle of various and often paradoxical ideas and attitudes. Mr. Houghton explores these ideas and attitudes, studies their interrelationships, and traces their simultaneous existence to the general character of the age. His inquiry is the more important because it demonstrates that to look into the Victorian mind is to see some of the primary sources of the modern mind. Character Of The Age -- Optimism -- Anxiety -- The Critical Spirit - And The Will To Believe -- Anti-intellectualism -- Dogmatism -- Rigidity -- The Commercial Spirit -- The Worship Of Force -- Earnestness -- Enthusiasm -- Hero Worship -- Love -- Hypocrisy. By Walter E. Houghton. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 431-444) And Index. IN 1858 a Victorian critic, searching for an epithet to describe "the remarkable period in which our own lot is cast," did not call it the age of democracy or industry or science, nor of earnestness or optimism. The emotional and intellectual attitudes of the Victorian era are carefully scrutinized