Being Victorian

How it felt then, Why it matters now

Jamie Camplin

$69.99

Hardback

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English

Unicorn Publishing Group
11 September 2025

History; Industrialisation & industrial history; History of ideas

Writers and poets, academics and art critics, mathematicians and experimental scientists, churchmen and politicians, women of strong opinions gather for a summer weekend in the 1870s. Is it real, or is it a fantasy? One thing's sure: their debates - about life's aims, rural and urban living, love and money, civilization and belief, the social framework, the past, the present and the future take us to the heart of the Victorian dream and its reality: the idea that their society exemplified 'Progress'. What did 'Progress' mean? Were things (and which things) getting better? What did 'better' mean? And for whom? The history of the world before the Victorians, from Aberdeen to Africa, showed a particular form of equality for almost everyone: an equality of poverty and no prospects, with kindness often in short supply. Victorians wanted to change that world, thought they were changing it, did change it. They did it in a human way: a melange of muddle, vision, certainty, doubt, too slow for many, too fast for some. Yet their changes were decisive both for creating the modern world, but also for revealing the dilemmas attached to mass living in urban, technological societies, as well as the moral flaws in imposing one civilization's or one person's beliefs on another. Most remarkably of all, the upheaval in making major transitions in every area of life, which produced revolutions and violence across Europe, in the Americas and in Asia, was carried out - at least in Britain itself - almost entirely peacefully. The past will always be a foreign country for those unwilling to engage with its people. Whether viewing the lives of rulers or the ruled, 'Being Victorian' corrects innumerable preconceptions.

By: Jamie Camplin
Imprint: Unicorn Publishing Group
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 870g
ISBN: 9781917458283
ISBN 10: 1917458282
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 11 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jamie Camplin took a double first in history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the mid-1960s after winning a place when he was sixteen. After a period working in industry and considering a political career, he changed direction and was successively Editorial Director and Managing Director (1979-2013) at Thames & Hudson. He is the author of The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England, the historical novel 1914: The King Must Die and, most recently, Books Do Furnish a Painting (with Maria Ranauro).

Reviews for Being Victorian: How it felt then, Why it matters now

‘Impressively wide-ranging, Being Victorian is at once bold, shrewd and humane, an apt mirror to its subject’ – Jeremy Black, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Exeter. ‘In our regressive times, it is both cautionary and consoling to look back at an era animated by the gospel of progress. Jamie Camplin's book honours the Victorian mission to improve the world, telling the story of a quiet, uncombative, inimitably British revolution that extended from politics and economics to morals and the mind. Eminent Victorians are treated with affection and also with shrewd wit as Camplin catches them occasionally straying from their high-minded principles. But Being Victorian does more than resurrect the past: it has an urgently contemporary relevance, and it concludes by suggesting that the technology which the Victorians thought so beneficent soon turned physically destructive and has now psychologically entrapped us. Intellectually thrilling and deeply humane, narrated with epic breadth and novelistic vitality, this is history at its finest. Peter Conrad, author of Dickens the Enchanter (2025), former Prize Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and Student Emeritus, Christ Church Oxford.