Abstract
In recent years politicians have extolled what they consider to be the virtues of Victorian values. They use the phrase as if the Victorian period were a smooth continuum from the ascension of the queen in 1837 to her death in 1901, but these years cover huge changes that make the early Victorian age quite different to the mid- or late Victorian one. We cannot therefore talk of Victorian values as if they were the same from the beginning to the end of the reign.
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Notes
See John Lloyd, ‘More Equal Than Ever’, New Statesman, 24 January 1997, pp. 21–3.
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle ( London and New York: Verso, 1990 ), p. 71.
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830–1890 ( London and New York: Longman, 1993 ), p. 136.
Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986 ), p. 200.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ( London and New York: Verso, 1991 ), p. 9.
Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism ( London: Routledge, 1993 ), p. 65.
J.H. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence (Cambridge: Mass., 1966). See also S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965) and P. J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
See Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, ‘State and Society’ in Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (eds), Crises in the British State 1880–1930 ( London: Hutchinson, 1985 ), pp. 7–32.
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Day, G. (1998). Introduction: Past and Present — the Case of Samuel Smiles’ Self Help. In: Day, G. (eds) Varieties of Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26742-2_1
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