Private lives, public spirit

the long version

"This is a lively and original new study of the social history of Britain between 1870 and 1914. Jose Harris surveys and reinterprets many themes: demography and disease, work and religion, social reform and social theory, feminism and family life. The period was marked by the co-existence of many trends and principles often believed to be mutually exclusive. Dr Harris vividly conveys a sense of the diversity which characterized the age, and reveals the doubts and ambivalencies of contemporaries. She shows that in many respects Great Britain at this period was a ramshackle and amorphous society, characterized by a myriad of contradictory opinions, at every level from parish pump to empire." "Private Lives, Public Spirit suggests that many 'Victorians' and 'Edwardians' were remarkably different from their modern stereotypes, and that much of what are now thought of as quintessentially 'Victorian values' stemmed less from traditional ideas and structures than from 'progressive' reformist movements of the very end of Victoria's reign. It is a readable and compelling depiction of Britain during the watershed period before the First World War: a period whose characteristic ideas and structures did not vanish with the war but survived with great tenacity over the next half-century."--BOOK JACKET.