Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.
Knopf, 314 pages, $24
The lurking modern presence which haunts Gertrude Himmelfarb’s latest exploration of Victoriana is that of Margaret Thatcher, who coined the phrase “Victorian values” (as it is generally rendered) in the 1983 British general election campaign. Only Beatrice Webb and John Stuart Mill, each with one index citation more, are mentioned more often than the Iron Lady, and their claim to authority on the subject of Victorian virtues is rather better established. But the former prime minister represents to Miss Himmelfarb the hope that our de-moralized society might somehow be re-moralized along Victorian lines, and her recurring presence thus signals the author’s polemical intent.
And why not? Miss Himmelfarb is a well-known authority on the Victorians (her books about the period include the monumental Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, published in 1984, and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, published in 1991), and in her earlier works an obvious sympathy for Victorianism as well as Victorians has been constrained by the demands of scholarship. It is time that she cut loose—not because we would have her take a vacation from scholarship, but because we have need of polemics which are as convincingly informed by it as this one is.
After an introductory discussion of the social significances to be attributed to the shift from “virtues” to “values,” Miss Himmelfarb launches into