Progress and pessimism : religion, politics, and history in late nineteenth century Britain
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Progress and pessimism : religion, politics, and history in late nineteenth century Britain
(Harvard historical studies, v. 104)
Harvard University Press, 1985
- alk. paper
Available at 28 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 211-230
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Faith in progress is a characteristic we often associate with the Victorian era. Victorian intellectuals and free-thinkers who believed in progress and wrote history from a progressive point of view-men such as Leslie Stephen, John Morley, W. E. H. Lecky, and James Anthony Froude-are usually thought to have done so because they were optimistic about their own times. Their optimism has been seen as the result of a successful Liberal campaign for political reform in the sixties and seventies, carried out in alliance with religious dissenters-a campaign that removed religion from the arena of public debate.
Jeffrey Paul von Arx challenges this long-standing view of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. He sees them as preoccupied with and even fearful of a religious resurgence throughout their careers, and demonstrates that their loss of confidence in contemporary liberalism began with their disillusionment over the effects of the Franchise Reform Act of 1867. He portrays their championing of the idea of progress as motivated not by optimism about the present, but by their desire to explain away and reverse if possible contemporary religious and political trends, such as the new mass politics in England and Ireland.
This is the first book to explore how pessimism could be the psychological basis for the Victorians' progressive conception of history. Throughout, von Arx skillfully interweaves threads of religion, politics, and history, showing how ideas in one sphere cannot be understood without reference to the others.
Table of Contents
* The Sources of Victorian Pessimism * Leslie Stephen: Inventing the Progressive Tradition * W.E.H. Lecky and the History of Retrogression * John Morley and the Politics of Destruction * Companion in Adversity: James Anthony Froude * Conclusion: The Political Implications of the Historiography of Progress * Notes * Index
by "Nielsen BookData"