A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain, and: The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (review)

Lately we seem to be spending less time forging new ways of looking at past events and texts and more time understanding how we have looked at them thus far. It is the age of the synthesis, the companion, and the retrospect. Not, as they say on Seinfeld, that there's anything wrong with that. See, for instance, such invaluable works as the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing or The women's suffrage movement : a reference guide, 1866-1928, the many Blackwell and Oxford Companions (to Modern European History, African American History, Scottish History, Military History, the History of Modern Science), as well as more specialized works like the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, 2003).

We should first appreciate the vast amount of work that goes into these endeavors. None of us is expert at everything, and this is becoming more apparent as knowledge continues to proliferate like hangers in the closet. We need syntheses, companions, and the like; editing and contributing to them are largely thankless endeavors for which we should all be more grateful than we are.

Having given thanks, we can interpret. That this is an age of synthesis and retrospect can be taken in at least two ways. Pessimistically, we can bemoan the paucity of new interpretations. Where the last quarter of the last century was a period of new theoretical models – notably the Foucauldian and postmodern – and intense debates over their proper application, the new century seems so far to be a caesura. We have no new approaches, and so instead we make lists. Optimistically, we can see the synthetic, companionable, and restrospective urges as narrative decisions, which have their own theoretical possibilities, and which are formative as well as summative.

Both of the books under review here are part of the list-making trend. Both paint portraits of nineteenth-century Britain and, in the process, of twentieth- and twenty first-century academia. One tries to cover everything, briefly, while the other skips around selectively. While the former approach seems more promising, the latter is, in this instance, more successful. A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain upholds the privileged position of high political history, and as such replicates the nineteenth-century assumptions it could interrogate. The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions, though it suffers from some degree of ivory-tower insularity, tries to reflect rigorously on the meanings of the 'Victorian' while providing much information.

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain is edited by Chris Williams and is part of the 'Blackwell Companions to British History' series. Just over 600 pages, it has 33 chapters (plus an introduction) and is divided into five parts, which vary from 80 to 130 pages in length: Britain and the World, Politics and Government, Economy and Society, Society and Culture, and The United Kingdom. Chapter topics vary in scope, from 'Parliamentary Reform and the Electorate' to 'The Arts' to 'Scotland', and every essay has endnotes and a list of titles for further reading.

The Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain has clear strengths. Among these are the reputations and abilities of its contributors. Editor Chris Williams (who also contributed the final essay, on 'British Identities'), along with Blackwell, has put together an impressive group of specialists, so that we have essays by Douglas Peers on empire, William Kuhn on the monarchy, Sarah Richardson on politics and gender, Shani d'Cruze on the family, Jane Humphries on the standard of living, Martin Hewitt on class, Philip Gardner on education, Lesley Hall on sexuality, Christine Kinealy on Ireland, E.W. McFarland on Scotland, and Matthew Cragoe on Wales, among others. These are big names in their...