Suddenly the Victorians have become controversial again. This is not because a new Lytton Strachey has sprung up in our midst, but because Mrs Thatcher - who polarises public opinion more forcibly than any prime minister since Gladstone - appropriates 'Victorian values' for herself and her party: 'those were the values when our country became great,' she told Brian Walden three years ago. The publication of these four books provides a timely opportunity for testing her claims. Historians, mostly on the left, have so far dismissed them, and even those not on the left rightly worry about the propagandist way in which Thatcher uses history; in a complex world their intellectual fastidiousness jibs at her confident certainties, simple remedies and evangelical tone. But her confident certainties are echoed on the other side: Michael Foot condemns her for praising Victorian values 'without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age'.

LRB 19 June 1986 | PDF Download