Jeffrey Hart on Some Victorians

Victorian Minds, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Knopf, $8.95

The nineteenth century began with a disaster, the French Revolution, and proliferated a series of filiated disasters, each revolution tightening the vice of tyranny. In its optimism, scientism, atheism, its monolithic ideologies, its cult of unreason, its mindless nationalisms, it provided the vocabulary of our twentieth-century intellectual and moral anarchy. Yet precisely because the nineteenth century was a disaster-—our disaster—the nineteenth century is endlessly fascinating.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

Featured Tags

Victorian Minds, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Knopf, $8.95

The nineteenth century began with a disaster, the French Revolution, and proliferated a series of filiated disasters, each revolution tightening the vice of tyranny. In its optimism, scientism, atheism, its monolithic ideologies, its cult of unreason, its mindless nationalisms, it provided the vocabulary of our twentieth-century intellectual and moral anarchy. Yet precisely because the nineteenth century was a disaster-—our disaster—the nineteenth century is endlessly fascinating.