This book was one of my college texts, but I didn't start reading it until 16 years after I left school. While the book is reasonably entertaining, the author assumes some things about his audience that might not be true. They might not, for example, be familiar with Victorian British politics, literature, and society; they might not, as well, know both French and Latin in addition to English. And so he assumes that they do not want either footnotes or a bibliography. In all cases he is wrong. ( )

This is a study of the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War, and Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work to Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools and Benjamin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark, Asa Briggs gives an assessment of Victorian achievements. In doing so, he conjures a picture of the progress and independence of the time.

Asa Briggs was born in 1921 at Keighley, Yorkshire, and from 1955 to 1961 he was Professor of Modern History at Leeds University, and in 1961 he was the first academic to be appointed to the then new University of Sussex. Six years later he was appointed Vice-Chancellor. From 1976 to 1991 he was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. He was Chancellor of the Open University from 1978 to 1994. In 1976 he was made a life peer. He is married with four children.His main field of historical research has been in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and cultural history. He has also written A Social History of England, a revised edition of which appeared in 1994. He is currently President of the British Social History Society and of the Victorian Society.