Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, December 1990

by T.C. Smout (Editor)

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about Victorian values. This collection, the outcome of the first joint symposium between the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, attempts to sift through the myths to illustrate how the reality of the Victorian age differs from modern perceptions. Of particular relevance is Raphael Samuel's important examination of Mrs. Thatcher's use of the concept, while the following chapters explore the Victorian world itself. The papers shed light on a wide variety of Victorian issues, from the Scotland of Samuel Smiles to the position of women.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1992

About the author

Thomas Christopher Smout CBE, FBA, FRSE, FSA Scot, FRSGS is a Scottish academic, historian, author and Historiographer Royal in Scotland.

He has written extensively on demographic history and many aspects of economic history. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed the new discipline of environmental history in Scotland, giving the Ford Lectures in Oxford in 1999, published under the title of Nature Contested, Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600. His most recent publications in this field have been in woodland history and an environmental history of the Firth of Forth.