Glare & Shadow

THE VICTORIANS (270 pp.)--Sir Charles Petrie--Longmans, Green ($6.75).

"It was an age," wrote Lytton Strachey, "in which all the outlines were tremendous and all the details sordid." Certainly, in Victorian England, island swelled into Empire, man's origins retreated from Adam to ape, man's progress advanced to antitoxins and turbines. But certainly, too, there was a precipitous drop from Disraeli to pestilent drains or from Darwin to shivering streetwalkers. Characteristically, it was an age of gaslight, which lighted the dark with a baleful glare, but produced furtive, disquieting shadows.

The Victorians everywhere moved between the illimitable and the unmentionable, their arms outstretched toward vast new horizons, their eyes averted from the simplest barnyard facts. Theirs was the pre-eminent age of the railway, the morning newspaper, the club, the waltz, and eventually the tea party. But it was the age, above all, of an entrenched middle class and hence an enthroned respectability. Men were known to play tennis in top hats. The Biblical historian. H. H. Milman, was ostracized for calling Abraham a sheik. The Victorian Sunday was as cheer less as a steel engraving; the Victorian matron went swathed in undergarments and taboos; the Victorian tourist, with a former Baptist missionary, Thomas Cook, for guide, came home from the Continent more insular than he had gone away; and there is the famous tale of the Victorian playgoer who, emerging from one of the more murder-strewn royal Greek tragedies, murmured: "How different from the home life of our own dear Queen!"

Consummate Actress. Their own dear Queen, with forbidding beneficence, hovered over it all, notably regal, notably bourgeois, and -- as Author Petrie remarks -- a consummate actress. The power of royalty was in one sense so limited that, as Bagehot declared in the 1860s, the monarch "must sign his own death warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to him." But the prestige of Victoria grew and grew, nor were her prerogatives trifling: she could disband the army, unman the navy, set free all prisoners, make every British citizen a peer.

Such contradictions abounded in an age whose propriety fostered its concealments. There was tremendous churchgoing, but lukewarm churchgoers, and a very worldly church: a future bishop examined candidates for Holy Orders while waiting to bat at cricket. And behind middle-class pomposity and plush cowered lower-class poverty and suffering: girl apprentices working a 20-hour day, girl coal miners standing in water up to their thighs.

To the Pit. Yet the immense assurance of the age proved the key to its immense achievement. Sir Charles Petrie provides no such brief, brilliant survey as does G. M. Young's Victorian England. But if The Victorians' outlines are fairly wayward, its details are often engaging. And parts of it go farther than usual afield--to Victorian Ireland and Scotland, for example. Prostrated by the terrible famine of the '40s, Ireland became so needy that even the highborn stole food at the Lord Lieutenant's parties, while the people seethed and periodically struck out. Ireland, too, suffered from the Queen's neglect as Scotland gained from her affection and her habit of spending all her summers at Balmoral. In Scotland's stern Calvinist circles, no one stole food at parties, but no one ate hot food on Sunday; and a widow, entering a theater for the first time in her life, suddenly saw a sign reading TO THE PIT, and raced frantically back to the pavement.

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