Asa Briggs
The Paradoxes of Progress
The Face of the Past: the Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England
By Charles Dellheim
Cambridge University Press 214pp £15 order from our bookshop
This fascinating study of the ways in which the Victorians approached the past reveals far more about Victorian values than volumes of Victorian anthology. Interest either in antiquity or in the middle ages – and the interest could be complementary or antagonistic was not confined to an elite of artists and social critics. It ran like a rich vein throughout the whole society and culture.
Dr Dellheim, a young American scholar, who is as much concerned with the visual as with the verbal, deals equally thoroughly with the surviving presence of the past at the core of an industrialising society and with the development of new buildings designed in a variety of medieval styles. He
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete