VICTORIOUS CENTURY
THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1800–1906
DAVID CANNADINE Allen Lane, 624pp, £30, Oldie price £17.97 inc p&p
The book opens in 1800, with the passage of the Act of Union with Ireland, and concludes with the Liberal landslide election of 1906. ‘It was a “Victorious Century”… for a United Kingdom whose hegemony rivalled that of the US and China today – but a century of contradictions for the people who lived in it,’ wrote Maya Jasanoff in the Guardian. ‘One of the pleasures of this immensely readable volume is its unapologetic emphasis on high politics, a historical fashion so old it’s new again. The great 19th-century statesmen – Pitt, Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and the now largely forgotten Earl of Derby – strut through these pages as bracing reminders, in today’s age of identity politics, that you can’t fully
‘Satisfaction lies in his polymathic command of the cultural life’
understand power without looking at the individuals who hold it… Another satisfaction lies in Cannadine’s polymathic command of the cultural life of the period.’ Christopher Kissane, in the
Financial Times, welcomed the fact that Cannadine ‘has no interest in sitting in judgment’. Instead, ‘his focus is on the contradictions of the age… Great reform came alongside recurring repression, staggering progress alongside greater poverty, unparalleled wealth alongside mass starvation (most notably in Ireland’s catastrophic Great Famine)… Polymathic cultural references are skimmed over, while discussions of social, economic and gender evolutions and revolutions seem frustratingly brief… This is not, however, a history with narrow horizons, and the marshalling of material across a huge breadth is greatly impressive.’ But frustration was the predominant note of David Aaronovitch’s review for the Times. Why only ‘about 300 words’ on the Indian Mutiny ‘in and after which up to 800,000 people may have died’? Several times he found himself ‘writing in the margin of my proof copy the word “why?”…’ A reference to changing contraceptive practices intrigued him, but was insufficient. ‘I could quite happily have taken a page on women, family and contraception (what contraception, exactly?) and maybe lost a Disraeli or two.’