High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

by Simon Heffer

Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind.
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people - politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers - who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society.
Simon Heffer's first major new book since the success of Strictly English explores this process of transformation, and will delight readers of similar titles such as A. N. Wilson's The Victorians. It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people - and how our forebears' pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, Politics, British Literature

896 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2013

About the author

Simon James Heffer is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

So it took me one year and eleven months to get through this tome . . . not exactly an engaging read. But a highly interesting one at moments, the most comprehensive and detailed look at Victorian intellectual and political life I've ever come across.

It'll stay on my keeper shelf in the hope that I will pick it up and read individual chapters again. That could be done without too much trouble, as each chapter is (loosely) themed and doesn't really link into the others. One of the biggest drawbacks this presentation had was that I frequently lost sight of the passage of time, and since the Victorian age was very long a sense of which decade or half-decade you're in is useful.

Another factor in the trouble I had with this book is that it was quite literally hard to read. I hope there's a hardback version out there with pages that lay relatively flat--I wish I'd bought it (I read all my fiction electronically, but not history books as I like dipping into them for reference). The spine width of the paperback version is a full 2in/5cm and it's tightly bound, which meant that I needed both hands with the spine rather uncomfortably resting on my leg.

All complaining aside, the writing was lively and engaging at times and I'm in awe at the amount of research Heffer must have undertaken. He truly does show the Victorians as high minds: it was an age of remarkable progress, towering intellects, and frequent self-sacrifice, and this book does a wonderful job of drawing together a history that is almost too vast to be written.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

After 817 pages I searched the endpapers in vain for the medal that my dedication deserved. Gosh this was hard work. Heffer has certainly done a lot of research, but his technique is simply to lay it all out before the reader. A typical subchapter focuses on a Victorian worthy and gives a fairly factual account heavily interspersed with quotes for his (or occasionally her) writings. There's by little in the way of comment or context, Heffer leaves the reader to supply that him or herself. There is some good stuff here, but chiefly because ther is much of interest in Victorian times and not because Heffer makes it interesting; this is in strong contrast to A. N. Wilson's Victorians which rattles along nicely. There are some dreadfully boring chapters - the design of the Albert Memorial is perhaps the worst, an interminable blow-by-blow account. There are also a lot of young divines having doubts which are pretty tedious too. For some reason this book got very good reviews in the press. It's difficult to see why. Sure Heffer has worked hard in gathering his material, but his deployment is very poor.

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

This epic tome is, as the title suggests, about the ‘high minds’ behind the Victorian movers and shakers who built Victorian Britain and established the foundations of the state as we know it today. Those ‘high minds’ are a small, select and tightly-knit band of men who by and large shared the same schooling, the same social backgrounds, and had the wealthy and education to have read, become acquainted with or in some cases engaged in philosophical dispute with the leading thinkers of the day – or at least those discussed in the book (Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold Senior and Junior being the most well-known).

Does this sound familiar? Until this book, I’ve been enjoying losing myself in history and forgetting about the history we are writing at the moment during this pandemic. Reading Heffer’s extremely erudite and impressive history, the two worlds collided for me. I couldn’t help draw parallels with our current government, and try as I might to stop doing so, the book made it horribly easy. Simon Heffer is a Tory in the old-fashioned sense of the word – I knew that when I bought the book, but that hasn’t stopped me enjoying other books written by similarly-inclined historians. But the more I progressed, the more the ‘tory’ aspects of it started to grate. It is incredibly London-centric. The great Victorian cities outside the UK capital get barely a mention. Scotland is sweepingly sidelined because it has gone its own way, legislatively. Wales is swept under the ‘England’ wing. And Ireland plays a role only as a dissenter. As for the north of England, it is used as an example and a stepping stone occasionally, with Bradford, Birmingham and Liverpool being bandied about when Factory Acts are being discussed, for example. But all of the great ‘improving’ legislation and the ethos behind them that did demonstrate the development of the state responsibility at the centre of this book, is discussed almost exclusively with regards London – sanitation, schooling, health, the Poor Law – I could go on. Sadly, the result was that I read vast swathes of it with gritted teeth muttering, nothing has changed. Would I have read it differently in different times? Impossible to say.

So what of the book? It is long-winded in places. There is a plethora of unnecessary detail in the discussions, for example, of the battle to build the Foreign Office which takes up pages and pages of the chapter on the Victorian obsession with the Gothic. In my view, the very interesting underlying issue was then completely lost in the author’s delight in detail of political shenanigans. Similarly in the discussion of the changes to the Education Act to make schooling compulsory – there was a massive amount about the to-ing and fro-ing and compromise, and frankly I got bored and skipped to the end just to find out what was eventually agreed. And here is one of my little niggly criticisms about the book in general – after a lot of discussion, the author has a tendency not to be particularly clear about the specifics of what is achieved, and he very rarely tells you what a Bill that has taken pages to progress actually becomes, with a date attached. I get that he’s trying to show the process of politics (and once again, I can’t help but draw parallels, being reminded too many times of the recent circus of the Brexit legislation), but enough already, please. There is an argument for occasionally cutting to the chase and not putting every bit of detail, no matter how interesting.

Women, as you’d expect from Victorians, feature mostly in the background. There is a chapter devoted to them, but it’s rather short and at one point seemed to be arguing that they owed their eventual emancipation entirely to John Stuart Mill.
By this time, I admit, I was reading with prejudice which is never a good thing. So taking a step back, what did I really think? For a start, I did actually read it cover to cover. I found masses of interest – I didn’t know about Octavia Hill’s forays into community housing, for example, and I found the section on the aftermath of the Crimean and the abolition of purchased commissions fascinating – and these are just two of tons of examples. I was fascinated and horrified to discover just how small a number of men shaped the thinking of another small number of men who then shaped the way the country was run – and prevented it being run in any other way, if it suited them.

But that takes me back to drawing parallels again, which it is unlikely the author intended me to do. So my overall feeling on finishing it is one of depression – Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French put it so well.

[John Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heffer's book runs for more than 800 pages, obviously you shouldn't pick it up unless you have some serious interest in the story of Victorian Britain. The book, however, is organized into chapters by theme, which offers the advantage of diving into one on, say, the rise of secularism or another on the competition between neoclassical Regency designs and Gothic ones to become the national architectural style of Britain. I ended up alternating Heffer's book with other less brick-like works. The disadvantage is that you don't get a chronological unfolding of the period. Certain characters (Palmerston, Gladstone, Dickens) appear and reappear and there is plenty of bouncing back and forth in time.

The greatest strength of the book, and its goal, is encouraging readers to rethink their preconceptions of Victorian Britain. If a common view of the period is that it was one characterized by a patronizing sexism, a lack of concern for the poor softened only occasionally by empty piety, a cruel and dark time that is fortunately followed by early modernity, Heffer sees the period instead as one when most of what we know accept as "modern" was established across an array of areas. In 1830, state intervention in private life and business was rare, by the end of the Victorian period, slum clearances, compulsory and free education, and food safety laws would be established. It wasn't yet the welfare state, but the foundations for it were laid. At the beginning of the Victorian period, women had next to no rights independent of their husbands. Before its end, divorce laws would be made less sexist and at least limited suffrage (in municipal elections) was accepted. The beginnings of multicultural and multi-faith Britain arguably begins with the emancipation of Catholics and Jews and the dropping of oaths that excluded Nonconformist Protestants from certain positions.

Seffer is exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting. Sometimes I wondered if I really needed, say, the blow-by-blow of attempts to secure funding for the Albert Memorial. More often, however, the details are intriguing. I didn't know anything about Angela Burdett-Coutts, whose difficult marriage helped change Britain's divorce laws, before I picked up the book and her story is fascinating. There are other figures like Dickens, Nightingale, and Disraeli that I now understand better (I have also added Roy Jenkins' Gladstone to my to-read list thanks to Seffer's book.)

One thing I did wonder after finishing the book is if it is perhaps too London-centric? I understand that London will inevitably get a large number of pages on any book on 19th-century Britain, but I think perhaps Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and, well, all of Scotland were somewhat slighted, with developments in those other parts of Britain mostly getting only passing references. Being pretty much just an armchair historian, I can't say for sure.

[Sorrento · Rating 4 out of 5]

High Minds is a big book about big personalities who’s ideas and actions influenced massive social change between 1840 and 1900 during the industrial revolution. In the book there is a lot of detail about the battles in parliament that took place to bring about improvements in the provision of education, public health, democracy and women’s rights. The arguments deployed for and against these improvements make fascinating reading e.g. those arguing against extending the franchise to the lower classes believed that this would be folly as the ordinary working people were largely uneducated at the time. There is also a lot of information in the book about the struggles to improve the provision of education and whether education should be made compulsory or not. Some of the big personalities include Prince Albert, Mathew Arnold, Disraeli, Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, Ruskin & Joe Chamberlain. The latter making his fortune by cornering the market in the manufacture of pointed screws in Birmingham and going onto becoming a prominent local and national politician promoting educational & public health reform.
Simon Heffer has written a v well researched book which I enjoyed reading although I did find it a bit heavy going at times because of the huge amount of information in this huge 817 page tome.

[Daniel Polansky]

Writing a cultural or intellectual history is a difficult task to set yourself; lacking concrete action or often, even, a clear chronology of events, the best manage to weave a narrative of an age through the ideas and creations of its artistic and intellectual champions. Alas, despite the enormous praise lavished on it, to my thinking High Minds, Simon Heffer's attempt to identify how the barbarians of the 1830's became the proto-moderns of the 1880's, does not meet the bar. Rather than express a coherent tableau, Heffer essentially ends up writing many dozens of small biographies about the prominent thinkers of the early and mid Victorian-age – Carlyle, Mill, Disraeli, etc., some of which are interesting, some of which aren't, none of which end up being more than puzzle pieces which never quite come together into a single picture. Some of the chapters – about the building of the Prince Albert Hall, and the World's Fair in particular – are so tedious and unrelated to the greater plot that it seems unbelievable that no editor swooped in to cut them. Like any large work of non-fiction, reading it will learn you things you didn't know, so it wasn't entirely a waste of my time, but still I can't imagine recommending to anyone, or at least to anyone I liked.

[Jason Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid portrait of the Victorian age , but one that focuses on reforms . This means that there are better books to give a more rounded view of the era - for example literature crops up here only insofar as it is relevant to reform.

But this covers much important ground and serves to remind us that there are good facets to the period. Here is Peel who put the importance of corn law reform before Tory unity, and against him the careerist Disraeli who only later really subscribed to reform and the belligerently anti reform Wellington. Here too is the great liberal reformer Gladstone who drove much important social change despite his many oddities.

This is an age where liberals drove reform which tories woke up to , and where one of the great paradoxes is that reform was often achieved by an uncoupling from religious tradition, but driven by evangelicals.

And over it all is Victoria , herself a deeply conservative and controlling parent, and Albert who had better instincts for what was in the wind. But go to AN Wilson or David Cannadine for a more rounded view of the period - or of course Jacob Rees Mogg if you think we still have the empire .

[Alistair · Rating 3 out of 5]

i am reading this and finding it very slow going . I must lack Victorian fortitude and steadfastness . Good though in small doses .
I am obviously a shirker . I just did not have stamina to finish the book . There was far to much about obscure clerics and their debates and the minutiae of House of Commons debates about whether it should admit Jewish MP's and the book lacked any sense of the broad sweep of the changes which were many and far reaching that occurred in Queen Victoria's reign . It as if some in 100 years hence was writing about Queen Elisabeth's reign and concentrated on the fracking debate at the expense of the internet .
Worthy but too academic for me .

[Antoine Vanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is joy for anybody interested in the Victorian period in Britain. The focus is on how intellect and earnestness (a great Victorian virue) were brought to bear on issues determining the sort of Britain which would emerge by 1880, one recognisable in their youth to the grandparents many of us remember. In concentrating on the 1840 to 1880 period it conveys very effectively how Modern Britain emerged from the late Georgian era. Engagingly and often wittily written I found myself hooked on it from Page 1

[Emmanuel-francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phew!

Through a mix of biography and analysis, the author tries to tell the story of the transformation of the British mind in the 19th century. That emphasis is necessary because I was expecting a history of the material transformation of Britain in that timeframe. I did not get that. As such, I was often bored stiff ploughing through pages of, essentially, committee reports and paeans to stuffy intellectuals.

[Rita Lei Chen 雷晨 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am disappointed. The only exciting thing in the book is probably its title. The author said at the beginning that he would write this book from a relatively macro level of intellectual history, but in fact, he is often trapped in a large number of trivial events and data, and there are few thought-provoking and logical summaries and conclusions.

[Sarah Harkness · Rating 4 out of 5]

A curates egg....some of it was very good, but as another reviewer commented, it could have been at least ten per cent shorter and ten per cent better...the blow by blow account of some of the political rows definitely needs pruning.

[Peter Ellwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A titanic piece of writing, a remarkable and readable account of the explosive development of ideas and attitudes and social change over the reign of Victoria, until the early 1880s. Simon Heffer’s book sets out to survey this development, the pursuit of ‘perfection’, or what he calls the high minds of an extraordinary, vital time: by looking at the lives and views of individuals: the politicians, or essayists (Matthew Arnold), or romantics (Carlyle), or scientists whose work challenged the entire basis of religious thought (Darwin), or even blue bloods such as Prince Albert, whose wonderful legacy graces Kensington to this day. He goes on to look at some of the more significant social upheavals of the period, such as the shift towards a merit-based system in the public service and the army: it is quite startling to realise how deeply opposed rational people were to the notion that you should be promoted because you are good at your job. And the role of women: only slightly less so for me, to see confirmation that the emancipation of women was part of a much wider movement towards equality: the real victims of entrenched prejudice were really the uneducated working classes, male and female.

The centre of gravity of the book is that pursuit of perfection, the movement towards “sweetness and light” . And what a moment in history it was: when he writes “[Carlyle] was one of several great thinkers of the period – Mill, Ruskin, Huxley, Arnold, Stephen were the others who used the earthquake of reform to recast their minds about the new future of Britain”, I could not help reflecting that our own age is possibly bereft of any such figures, let alone such a weighty handful. Maybe that is too pessimistic, maybe we cannot identify such people except in the rear-view mirror, maybe people like Bertrand Russell or even such as Andrew Neill will come to be seen in a similar light by future historians. Either way, SH’s discussion of that collective rise of Victorian emancipation in its broadest sense strikes me as a direct antecedent of contemporary cultural swirls, from the inexorable growth of “human rights” as a fundamental and obvious thing (in Victorian England, it wasn’t either of those things) to the rights of women to their own bodies, or the rights of blacks or changing views on what “democracy” actually means. It all started then.

His tone is always balanced and restrained, but he writes so smoothly that the narrative is really quite gripping. It might be gigantic at 800 pages or more, but quite often, as each chapter came to an end, I found myself wishing he had taken his time more and had written at still greater length of many of these high minds. There are one or two subjects that he explored at too great a length to my tastes – the otherwise fascinating emergence of a proper schools’ education policy for example. But in some areas I’d have liked more. He does not really touch on the last decade or two of Victoria’s reign, and there is no mention of foreign policy or of the empire (surely the beating heart of British “sweetness and light” for much of her reign). I wish he had written more. In fairness I should add that I appear to be in something of a minority of Goodreads reviewers in that view: caveat emptor, as they say. But still, if long books don’t scare, you it’s a humdinger.

[John Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book in part because I disagreed with the author’s perspective, while appreciating his intellect and skill as a writer. The author of this delightfully odd book is very much a Conservative. I don’t say this as an accusation, it is a simple fact, like the fact I am writing this on a Wednesday. Simon Heffer decides not to talk about the empire or foreign policy, regardless of its importance; he decides to barely discuss the arts. There are eye rolling, hagiographic vignettes, whenever the British statesman Gladstone or Prince Albert appear within his chapters; there are vitriolic flourishes whenever the British statesman Disraeli appears. And yet the book is magisterial when chronicling the intellectual debates of the Victorian area.

[David Bisset · Rating 5 out of 5]

A survey on the grand scale

Simon Heffer covers a multiplicity of themes. He writes fluently, sometimes tendentiously, and deals with his themes in great detail. It is an enormously detailed volume. In areas which are not my particular interest the sense narrative was hard going, but in in areas which cover my personal interests such as architectural and urban history I had no problems! In his biographical explorations Heffer fully justified his title High Minds. The Victorian Era is certainly still with us!

[John Hounslow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Heffer is one of the most readable historians and relates not just of the events but explores the characters who affected our history and yet does not fall into the trap of “cod” psychology so beloved by many historians. To understand the changes our Victorian ancestors made this book is an essential read.

[James Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. Heffer provides a lot of social history about Victorian England but I found it a hard slog. This partly may be because he gives far too much credit to reformers who did the least they could and left matters not that much better than they found them.

[LRKK · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and learned, long but readable, this is a wonderful portrait of the modern world being created out of the medieval mind. It was a messy process, and Heffer doesn’t disguise that fact but rather celebrates the passionate debates that produced change.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another epic tale of the Victorians, their lives and times. Love the grand sweep and love the details. A rollicking read

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and thorough look at all facets of life in Victorian England.

[Carlos Montijo]

Recommended by Amy Wax on Chronicles interview:
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/8...