• DOI:10.1017/S0018246X00024201
• Corpus ID: 162264240

The State Of Victorian Political History

@article{Parry1983TheSO,
  title={The State Of Victorian Political History},
  author={Jonathan P. Parry},
  journal={The Historical Journal},
  year={1983},
  volume={26},
  pages={469 - 484}
}

• J. Parry
• Published 1 June 1983
• History
• The Historical Journal

The Prime Ministers' Papers Series. W. E. Gladstone. IV: Autobiographical memoranda, 1868-1894. Edited by John Brooke and Mary Sorensen. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1981. Pp. viii+ 166. £15. In a recent review of Crouzet's The Victorian economy, Roderick Floud chastised historians of the modern British economy for adopting an unduly narrow approach to their subject. He argued that scholars continued to treat the period as capable of division into self-contained topics, suitable for specialized study in total isolation from each other. The result of this approach had been to leave what Postan called the 'big questions' unanswered: there had been inadequate exploration of the connexions between the various components of the economic machine, and thus, despite all the detailed work done, we lacked a systematic overview of how things actually worked. This complaint is familiar to the student of Victorian political history: it stems in large part from the difficulty inherent in viewing periods near to our own in their proper perspective. Research into the politics of the nineteenth century has tended to concentrate on those aspects of the period which can be interpreted as stepping-stones on the route to democracy or to bureaucracy: as the Victorian era becomes more remote from us, this tendency has diminished, but it has not been replaced by any consistent attempt to elucidate the assumptions and perspectives which nineteenth-century politicians brought to contemporary issues of significance without which it is difficult to attain a clear conception of much of Victorian political activity. Indeed, confusion as to the role of the historian of nineteenth-century politics may be a major cause of the comparative lull in research into the exercise of power at that time. A lot of work has been and is being done-much of it worthwhile and stimulating-on various aspects of the social history of the period: