8--- Portrait of an Age. by G. M. Young (read 8 Aug 2023) is abstruse and less than interesting ( )

According to Wikipedia, "Simon Schama has described it as 'An immortal classic, the greatest long essay ever written.'" Unfortunately it is way over my head, elliptical and full of allusions to people and events that I have never heard of. I am determined to finish this, but frankly I have no clue what this guy is talking about most of the time. Maybe it will appeal to people who already know all about Victorian England. ( )

A selection of points of interest:
As an example of Early Victorian earnestness, the Rochdale Pioneers declared their objects were "the moral and intellectual advancement of its members."
"Gas-lighting of the streets was hardly an improvement as much as a revolution in public security."
Some fine examples of Early Victorian emotion - "We are in an age when, if brides sometimes swooned at the altar, Ministers sometimes wept at the Table."
The importance of sermons in moulding oratory and prose.
"Unemployment" is not used before the 'sixties - Early Victorians were dominated by Malthus instead.
"The manners of Parliament in the thirties seems to have been the worst on record."
Growth of statistics a result "very largely" of the insurance business.
Early Victorian civil servants of two kinds: mere clerks, and advisers to the head of department. No administrators because there were so few laws to administer.
From marriage registers it appears that in thirties about one third of men and two thirds of women could not sign their own name.
Kay-Shuttleworth, Secretary to Commission of Council on Education, persuaded Commission to set up a Training College. Them to get over denominational difficulties, he became Principal himself, and for some years ran both jobs. [A characteristic Early Victorian story.]
"Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in."
Victoria at first very popular in Ireland.
Brougham used phrase "middle-class" in 1831.
By sixties prep schools existed and one, Temple Grove at East Sheen, was famous. But "a public-school education was no necessary part of the social curriculum... at the University or in after-life it made no difference."
Late Victorian age saw dethronement of ancient faith and the transition to democracy; Early Victorian age saw the change of 1832, the railway and steamship, the founding of the dominions.
Victorian taste was curiously uniform through the classes.
The permeation of local government by Fabianism is the Late Victorian equivalent of the capture of Poor Law administration by Benthamism.
"As I see it, the function of the nineteenth century was to disengage the disinterested intelligence, to release it from the entanglements of party and sect - one might almost add, of sex - and to set it operating over the whole range of human life and circumstance."
Maitland more than any other English writer has grasped "the final and dominant object of historical study: which is, the origin, content, and articulation of that objective mind which controls the thinking and doing of an age or race, as our mother-tongue controls our speaking."
This book is written in beautiful English, and the author carries gracefully an amazingly wide knowledge of the period. He studs his pages with Mathew-like flashes of insight, and the book is unquestionably of very great value as a study of the period. But whether the author fulfils his own requirements for the study of history, as quoted above - whether indeed his words on the point mean anything definite at all - is a more doubtful question.