The Victorian View

A historical look at how Victorians characterized humanity--from novels to statistics, social sciences to art

How can we make well-informed, humane generalizations about our own culture or other cultures around the globe when there are quite simply so many of them, and so many people to characterize? And how can we understand the masses of people even in one city? Should we turn to literature, political reportage, statistics, art? In Victorian England's rapidly globalizing world, especially in London, the world's largest metropolis at the time, conscientious people tried various ways of making sense of the human diversity all around them. Some created the realist novel; others leaned on social science and statistics. Further approaches ranged from painting a four-hundred-foot-wide panorama of London to attempting to index all geography papers.

The Victorian View, a carefully researched and well-written cultural history on how the Victorians tried to characterize humanity, starts with the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Author Edward Beasley also examines the writings of social scientists, travel writers, artists, politicians, and journalists, including Harriet Martineau, all with their markedly different understandings of the world. Through close readings of both the very famous and very obscure, The Victorian View asks how certain Victorians developed new ways of seeing and living among the great mass of humanity by which they were surrounded. In their teeming world and in ours, how do we reconcile different kinds of evidence and habits of mind to get a deeper understanding of the massive number of people around us? For anyone who has wondered how the modern world came to be, The Victorian View provides a look into this rapidly changing society.