Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906

Cannadine (The Undivided Past), professor of history at Princeton, focuses on high politics, with a fondness for historical irony and an eye for patterns, in this steady history of 19th-century Britain. He book-ends his study with two telling events: the 1800 Act of Union, which united Ireland with Great Britain, and the 1906 general election, which brought into power the same Liberal Party that had split over the issue of Irish home rule in the 1880s. As Cannadine notes, 19th-century Britain bequeathed to the world many of the institutions of modern life: stamps, photographs, bicycles, football, telephones, sewers, detective novels, and even bacon and eggs. It was also deeply religious, imperial-minded, and governed by an entrenched aristocracy—a place where winter living conditions for the working classes were “almost unendurable.” Determined to reconcile these two images of 19th-century Britain as both the birthplace of modernity and a gloomy Victorian twilight, Cannadine writes fluently about Britain’s rise to industrial preeminence and subsequent world-leading status, providing a detailed examination of political machinations and imperial excursions. Cannadine’s account is solid and informative, but it lacks anything remotely bold or provocative, or anything that complicates the book’s central thesis of the remarkable stability of British political institutions compared to their continental counterparts. Maps & illus. (Feb.)