Victorian America and the Civil War by Anne C. Rose (review)

154 Canadian Review of American Studies thought was almost entirely guided by that of the Soviet Union, with little or no recognition of the possibility of nurturing a burgeoning American left ideology. With the onset of the war, then, an American notion of nationalism was the territory of the right, which the Partisan Review, and the left, could only respond to, and weakly, with a defense of an international culture. Writers and Partisans has been republished with a brief new Introduction by Gilbert, but otherwise the text is unchanged from the first edition. It stands as a comment not only on the thirties and forties but also on the sixties. They were a simpler time, and Writers and Partisans cannot but show clearly, if unintentionally, how fundamental has been the shift of historical methodologies in the 1970s and 1980s. Sylvia Vance Oxford University Anne C. Rose. Victorian America and the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 304. In Victorian America and the Civil War, Anne Rose has attempted to "examine the relationships between long-term trends, the principal concern of social history, and public events, the subject of traditional political history" (xi). She uses the biographies of seventy-five men and women to examine the "struggles of middle-class Victorians to define satisfying values in times of both peace and war 11 (4). Both are admirable choices. Unfortunately, Rose looked for individuals of similar social traits, "in an effort to comprehend the culture of the most prosperous and educated members of the middle-class" (4). As a result, her findings represent a rather select group, which is more elitist than middle class. It is a shame that Rose sought so desperately to create a monolithic Victorian society. The results are not convincing, as even her carefully chosen subjects provided materials which suggest regional varieties, which she finally admitted when introducing her findings about work (71). What makes American society so interesting in the nineteenth century is its diversity-from the traditionalism of New England, to the bustle of growing cities, to the emerging grandeur of the Book Reviews 15S South, to the opportunism of the frontier West. To attempt to obfuscate these differences robs nineteenth-century America of its appeal. Rose has provided an interesting look at nineteenth-century Victorian society, examining such categories as religion, work, leisure, family, politics, and the impact of the Civil War. Rose began by looking at the struggles her Victorians underwent regarding their religious convictions. She discovered a move away from spiritual concerns to the practicality of the material and political world of the nineteenth century. The mental anguish her subjects endured is not unique to Victorian America. The same religious questioning has occurred repeatedly in American history from Puritan New England to the present day. Secular education can easily ride roughshod over religious knowledge, which usually remains at the most elementary level and cannot match the sophistication of higher secular education, until an event (like the Civil War) prompts individuals to seek further instruction about religion to satisfy an inner yearning for spiritual fulfilment, as happened to some of her subjects. The author raises some interesting points in her succeeding chapters, as her Victorians tried to find themselves and define and redefine their values within an ever-changing American society. She was probably correct in asserting that ultimately for her Victorians, politics defined life's goals the way religion no longer did. Rose seemed surprised, however, that southern plantation elites would be so secure in their social philosophy and not question the morality or position of slavery as the cornerstone of southern society. She also seemed surprised that these southerners were not agonizing over the political issues surrounding slavery and secession as were her northerners. I would have been surprised if those she included in her study had debated them. I recommend Daniel Croft's Reluctant Confederates as an introduction to that political turmoil she expected to find in her southerners, but missed due to her narrow choice of subjects. Rose also down played or ignored both the entertainment factor politics played in the nineteenth century and the fact that her subjects were wealthy enough to participate so fully...