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From the Crimea to South Africa, from Tennyson to Oscar Wilde, Wilson has an enormous span of time and space to cover, and he more or less pulls it off. I say "more or less" because in any book of this size there are bound to be sins of omission.
For example: Wilson admirably discusses both Prince Albert and the impact of the American Civil War on the British, who were for the most part pro-Confederate, due to England's reliance on cotton produced by the slave-owning South. Yet he completely ignores the Trent Affair, one of the most dramatic incidents of the Civil War that didn't take place on a battlefield. Two Confederate diplomats en route to England were forcibly taken off a British ship and imprisoned in the North. The British public was in an uproar, and it took the intervention of Prince Albert, then on his deathbed, to find a peaceful solution (the North returned the diplomats) and prevent England from going to war with the United States for the third time in a century. Had this incident gone the other way, it might have altered the outcome of the Civil War. There isn't a word of this in the book.
What is in the book, however, more than makes up for its omissions. Some of his conclusions seem to be a little far-fetched, and I grew a little tired of his incessantly referring to us, his readers of "the twenty-first century" (a phrase that he repeats with mind-numbing regularity). And I would have liked to hear more about the giants of the Victorian novel (you won't read much about Thackeray or Trollope here, which is a shame).
But these are tiny complaints about a book that gets a lot of things right on a very large canvas. So if you have any interest at all in the Victorian era, I would say that this book is well worth your time. And it might inspire you to read more about this fascinating period in British history.
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I needed this book for a governmental accounting course in college and when my bookstore wouldn't buy it back from me I wept tears. Luckily, my governmental accounting professor was really good otherwise there is no way I would have learned anything from this course. If you can possibly find some other book or maybe a newer edition would be better. The only somewhat helpful thing about this book was the City of Smithville project (CD-ROM) but even that had problems. It had a lot of technical difficulties and if you messed up an entry you pretty much had to start the project all over again. If you are doing City of Smithville, beware!
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The reader in search of a 'pop' history of the Victorians and their world is still best served by the first two volumns in Jan Morris's trilogy of the Victoran and Edwardian world. The first work,"At Heavens Command", provides a generalized look at the Victorian world while Morris's second volumn examines that same wolrd in the year of the Diamond Jubilee.