¹ Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians (1918; New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), p. vii. See Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “A Geneaology of Morals: From Clapham to Bloomsbury,” chap. 2 in Marriage and Morals among the Victorians and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1987).

² See Briggs, Asa, “G. M. Young: The Age of a Portrait,” in his The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs, vol. 2, Images, Problems, Standpoints, Forecasts (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), pp. 253–71. “I am one of the few men who can not only write but think Victorian,” wrote Young in 1948.

³ See Cannadine, David, “Welfare State History,” chap. 16 in his The Pleasures of the Past (London: Collins, 1989).

⁴ Samuel, Raphael, “Mrs. Thatcher's Return to Victorian Values,” in Victorian Values, ed. Smout, T. C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 18.

⁵ See Price, Richard, “Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of British Studies (in press); also Harris, José, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

⁶ Compare Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (1957; New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1975), p. xiii. Houghton argues that there was a “common culture” for which the term “Victorianism” is appropriate, but he restricts his classic study to “artist-thinkers.” Himmelfarb writes: “Mid-Victorian England was more moral, more proper, more law-abiding than any other society in recent history” (p. 21).

⁷ Thus, e.g., the “bourgeois style” in sexuality and love may not easily fit stereostyles of Victorian prudery and passionless marriages. See Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience, vol. 1, Education of the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Barret-Ducrocq, Françoise, Love in the Time of Victoria, trans. Howe, John (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), for sexual relations among the laboring poor; Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For the sexual crisis of the late nineteenth century, see Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1990).

⁸ Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G., British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 31–35, and chap. 1 more generally.

⁹ Ruskin, John, Sesame and Lilies (1865; London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 69. See Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), for a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the formation of early Victorian gender ideology and practice. For doubts about the usefulness of the concept of separate spheres, see Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414.

¹⁰ Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

¹¹ See Colley, Linda, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 309–29.

¹² Compare Rubinstein, W. D., “British Radicalism and the ‘Dark Side’ of Populism,” in his Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History: Essays in Social and Economic History (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 339–73.