The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays brings together some of the finest and most influential prose of the nineteenth century, with selections from writers including Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde.
Chosen and introduced by the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, these essays confront the great questions of their age—religion and doubt, democracy, industrialisation, science, art, socialism, feminism and social responsibility. The collection remains important because many of those questions are still ours: how should society respond to rapid technological change, widening inequality, political division and the weakening of shared beliefs?
These writers disagreed profoundly, but they treated public debate as a serious intellectual and moral undertaking. At a time of hurried opinions and abbreviated arguments, this is a wonderfully rich reminder of what the essay can achieve.
