An Expanding Society: Britain 1830-1900 by G. S. R. Kitson Clark; Economic and Social Changein a Midland Town: Victorian Nottingham, 1815-1900 by Roy A. ChurchReview by: Asa BriggsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 607-608Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1853750 .

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Modern Europe 607 book certainly recognizes most of the key issues about the relationship between crime and Victorian society. If it does not provide all the answers, it must be remembered that Tobias is walking an untrodden path. Either he or other his- torians will have to fill in the picture with more detailed monographs and studies of the statistics or of particular localities. When this is done, we will have a much better basis for judging his conclusions and, incidentally, for knowing much more than we do now about the dark side of Victorian life. Harvard University DAVID PEIRCE

AN EXPANDING SOCIETY: BRITAIN 1830-I900. By G. S. R. Kitson Clark. (New York: Cambridge University Press. I967. PP. xv, I88. $5.50.)

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN A MIDLAND TOWN: VIC- TORIAN NOTTINGHAM, I8I5-I900. By Roy A. Church. [Reprints of Economic Classics.] (New York: Augustus M. Kelley. I966. PP. xxiv, 409. $I5.00.)

DR. Kitson Clark's useful and stimulating collection of lectures on nineteenth- century British history deserves wider circulation than would have been achieved at the University of Melbourne, where the lectures were originally delivered. The auspices were relevant, however, for Kitson Clark used the occasion to place British history in a somewhat different context from that with which he has been concerned in his earlier and more definitive books. He was obviously seeking to make British history meaningful to students who had never seen Britain but who shared some of its attitudes and traditions. "Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow and the rest," he stated in his first lecture, "were indeed the first and for long perhaps the most outstanding creations of a great folk wandering, and they were in many ways as intellectually remote from the old as if they were in Australia or America." This lecture set the tone. Yet the book would have been even more valuable if it had involved comparison as well as reorientation; some of the themes call for a more profound social analysis. For specialists the most interesting chapters of the book touch on recent research or on work in progress carried out by the author's pupils. The last lecture on "The Modern State" is particularly stimulating.

Dr. Church's thorough and well-balanced account of Victorian Nottingham is an excellent example of recent work on urban history. It begins with a picture of Nottingham in i8I5. The town was a local capital, and it attracted persons of rank as well as rising industrialists. Yet it was a backward industry, framework knitting, that most strongly influenced the social and political atmosphere of the town during the first few decades of the century, and Luddism, which is well described, and Chartism were both effective local movements of protest. Industrial advance was slow and sporadic, although the machine-made lace industry deserved the adjective "progressive," which Church attaches to it. There are particularly good chapters on urban expansion and the emergence of a "new Nottingham," which can be used to illustrate important general points about the relation of land use to population growth. The political chapters are illuminating, but the last chapter on "Victorian City" could be profitably expanded. What made Not- tingham not unique but distinctive was the influence of the sense of the city's

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6o8 Reviews of Books historic past on the Victorian civic gospel. As two earlier historians of the city, who wrote in I893, put it: "amid the unresting roll of our modern machinery and the din of today's business we may hear, if we only listen, the voices of a venerable past."

The great merit of Church's book is that he starts with local experience and its documentation rather than with an outline of natural history that is then filled out with local examples. No attempt is made, however, to compare Nottingham with other cities or to place it firmly in its regional setting. Once again, an effort at comparison, in this case implicit as well as explicit, would have strengthened what is in its own setting a most rewarding monograph. University of Sussex ASA BRIGGS

VICTORIAN MINDS. By Gertrude Himmelfarb. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. I968. Pp. Xiii, 392, v. $8.95.)

Victorian Minds is difficult to review. Its thirteen chapters call for thirteen reviews, for this is not so much a book as a miscellany of Gertrude Himmel- farb's stylish essays, reprinted from sources as varied as the New York Review of Books and the journal of British Studies. The essays have been reworked, but not so as to connect them in any deliberate way. There are pieces on Burke, Bentham, Malthus, Mill, Acton, Leslie Stephen, Bagehot, Froude, Buchan, the Victorian ethos, the Victorian Angst, Darwinism, and the Reform Act of I867. The quality of scholarship and the range of knowledge displayed are of course no surprise to students of Himmelfarb's major books on Acton and Darwin; her prose, however, has an unusual quality of leisureliness and grace not often afforded today.

Himmelfarb on Burke consists of two opposed essays, the later one refuting the earlier in an interesting, even daring, trick of self-exposure by the historian. Neither quite resolves the issues raised, however. Burke's "partiality for prejudice and superstition," for example, may be part neither of "conservative strategy" nor of "liberal strategy," but simply a sociological grasp of the real forces operating in society. Bentham is seen at his horrifying worst through his Panopticon (plan for a modern prison), and doubt is thereby cast on the quality of Philosophical Radicalism as a genuine reform movement. Malthus, on the other hand, appears in a favorable liberal light once a very sharp distinction is drawn between his first and second editions. John Stuart Mill divides into three Mills, the first and last more cautious and somber, the middle period Mill, dominated by Harriet Taylor, more egalitarian and liberal, doctoring a new edition of his Political Economy to accommodate Harriet's budding socialism. Leslie Stephen emerges as a failure, his potential crushed by the repressive emotional values of Victorian middle-class society that he internalized, turning himself into a mere professional writer. In contrast, Bagehot, who might super- ficially seem more professional still, was armed with a sense of the absurdity of life and pitted himself against the pressures of a railway magazine culture; while Buchan, the "last Victorian," wrote both unconcernedly and spontaneously, all his prejudices tumbling out with great confidence. Himmelfarb has been accused elsewhere of underplaying Buchan's anti-Semitism; the charge is simplistic and

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