Britannia's burden

Bernard Porter's lively and astringent new history of the period traces the origins of most of the problems that confront Britain today back precisely to that 'golden age' of the 1850s. The recently fashionable view that attributes decline to the abandonment of 'Victorian values' is misconceived: for the opposite is true. Britain's progress from hybrid capitalism, through imperialism and socialism, to her present version of free marketism developed from her situation in the mid-Victorian era. So did the economic deterioration that accompanied it. The seeds were already there, in the ground, in 1850. . There is a refreshing awareness in these pages of the fusing of past and present, of the longevity of certain powerful characteristics in British life, and of their interrelatedness. Bernard Porter's portrait of 140 years of British history fundamentally questions many of the conventional pieties and long-cherished beliefs that still attach, limpet-like, to the period.