This is an irritating, and generally incoherent book,
partly redeemed by its coverage of what was an
interesting period, full of interesting people, and by
Wilson’s fine eye for interesting, illustrative
and often witty quotes. It’s incoherent because
Wilson provides no real structure to his book. His
chapters are arranged in a chronological order, but
there is nothing else to link one chapter to another.
Worse still, the individual chapters are also incoherent
in themselves. When beginning a chapter, one gets
little sense of where one will be at the end of the same
chapter. Wilson seems to think that his chapters should
be like essays. Even a collection of self-contained
articles would be better than this because the reader
would get some impression of an argument or thesis being
advanced by the text.
If these many essays (there are 43 chapters) were
consistently informative and engaging, I’d probably
forgive Wilson his incoherence. The essay is possible
of great things in well-qualified hands. And I think
Wilson generally does well with his chosen form: his
leaps and links from one subject area to another are not
too awful in most cases. No, this book’s most
significant flaw is that Wilson consistently says things
designed to irritate me.
My fundamental problem with this book is that Wilson is
profoundly anti-modern. He is a conservative who
believes that life in the country before 1820 was
probably better for everyone. He waxes lyrical about
rural paradises and spends a lot of time decrying life
in cities. He doesn’t ever really address the fact that
cities grew in this period because of large scale
migration from the rural paradises; the inhabitants
clearly thought life in the cities was better. He rants
long and often about how awful city life was, but gives
little time to the fact that the self-same Victorians
were busily improving city conditions the whole time.
Wilson is typically English in his attitude to agriculture: he
seems to think that war-enforced self sufficiency followed by
typically European levels of protectionism (and overproduction)
have been a good thing. But Wilson can’t really decide
what he thinks, because even as he reckons that protectionism and
general government interference in the economy would be good in
this case, he is scathing about government initiatives and
reforms in areas such as primary schools. Initiatives of this
sort are scathingly dismissed as Benthamite. He is admiring of
Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury (in fact, the aristocracy tends
to receive a great deal of admiration), who helped bring in
legislation to reform working practices in factories and mines,
but he dismisses other reforms as Government interference in
people’s liberty. It boils down to whether or not
something can be seen as a cocking a snook to the evil
capitalists and laissez-faire types. If they’re
put out by a reform, it’s good. Otherwise it’s
Benthamite.
Another irritating feature of Wilson’s book is his tendency
to fawn over his heroes. These include Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, John
Ruskin, Cardinal Manning and Prince Albert. To read Wilson is to be
exposed to the view that if Prince Albert had only lived a little
longer, the First World War might have been averted. People who
opposed his heroes tend to get short shrift, which means that
Gladstone is regarded pretty negatively throughout. For example,
Wilson wants to blame Parnell’s downfall on the English Liberals
(led by Gladstone), but has to admit that it was the Irish Home Rule
party that really brought him low. Further, after Parnell’s
affair with Katherine O’Shea was publicised, it was the
supposedly non-puritanical Irish who repeatedly failed to elect his
faction in various bye-elections.
Finally, I was extremely irritated by Wilson on Darwin. On the
strength of one book by Michael Behe, he claims that natural selection
has no answer to the objection that intermediate forms (for structures
like eyes and wings) are not plausible. This is nonsense, and
it’s obvious he didn’t do any research into the issue. It
seems clear that he looked for something out there to confirm his
prejudices and cited it as support. (Behe’s book,
Darwin’s black box is effectively demolished in this review.)
Another science nitpick: Wilson also claims that
By then [the 20th century], Wittgenstein
really had refuted Russell’s ideas about the
foundations of mathematics...
This is nonsense, and one can only imagine that Wilson says it
because he wants it to be true.
So, what, if anything, redeems this book? Being a series of essays,
it’s pretty undemanding, and also generally entertaining.
Wilson covers the literature, art, politics and journalism of the
period pretty well, so that chapters of his that stick to these fields
are interesting and readable. He also gives major events (Crimean
War, Indian Mutiny, Boer War, Parnell’s career) well-written
narratives. As I said initially, he also has a impressive selection
of quotes littered through his text.