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9781917458283

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‘Impressively wide-ranging, Being Victorian is at once bold, shrewd and humane, an apt mirror to its subject’ – Jeremy Black, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Exeter. ‘In our regressive times, it is both cautionary and consoling to look back at an era animated by the gospel of progress. Jamie Camplin's book honours the Victorian mission to improve the world, telling the story of a quiet, uncombative, inimitably British revolution that extended from politics and economics to morals and the mind. Eminent Victorians are treated with affection and also with shrewd wit as Camplin catches them occasionally straying from their high-minded principles. But Being Victorian does more than resurrect the past: it has an urgently contemporary relevance, and it concludes by suggesting that the technology which the Victorians thought so beneficent soon turned physically destructive and has now psychologically entrapped us. Intellectually thrilling and deeply humane, narrated with epic breadth and novelistic vitality, this is history at its finest. Peter Conrad, author of Dickens the Enchanter (2025), former Prize Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and Student Emeritus, Christ Church Oxford.

Author Information

Jamie Camplin took a double first in history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the mid-1960s after winning a place when he was sixteen. After a period working in industry and considering a political career, he changed direction and was successively Editorial Director and Managing Director (1979-2013) at Thames & Hudson. He is the author of The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England, the historical novel 1914: The King Must Die and, most recently, Books Do Furnish a Painting (with Maria Ranauro).

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