A toast to Victorian Britain

Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English — as opposed to the Scots and the Irish — merely consume a lot of well-written military history. The other evening, stimulated by a few decent bottles, someone raised a hoary question. If we could have been born in an earlier century — pre-20th — which would we have chosen? What epoch was worthy to compare with the Antonines and those Good Emperors, as praised by Gibbon?

The consensus was that, assuming a strong constitution and plenty of money, the long 19th century in Britain, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to 1914, would have been as good as any. Of course, we must restrain the roseate glow of retrospect. History is written backwards but lived forwards. At various stages, there were outbreaks of disorder which we tend to dismiss because we know that they never came to much, but which did alarm contemporaries who lacked foreknowledge. Even so, to steal Jack Plumb’s title for his book on 1675-1725, from 1815 onwards there was a growth of political stability in Britain. Disraeli may have sneered at Tory men and Whig measures, but in practice, that was not a bad form of government. Nor was it one which Dizzy himself significantly disrupted when he came to power.

All in all, we can surely agree that for a healthy member of the upperish classes, Victorian Britain was a pleasant place to live. It may have lacked the full douceur de vivre which pre-revolutionary French aristocrats enjoyed, but look how that ended.

So: it would not have been a bad fate to be born around 1815, and participate in the intellectual and cultural excitements of the age as well as in the successes of public life, including the growth of Empire: ‘wider still and wider’.