J. B. Priestley — Victoria's Heyday

Penguin Books Ltd 1974 Paperback, 296pp. A rich and beautifully illustrated panorama of that most Victorian of decades - the eighteen-fifties. These were the years of Victoria's greatest happiness with her beloved Albert, of the Great Exhibition and the flowering of literary activity led by Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Tennyson and many others; the huge paradoxes of industrial expansion, middle-class consolidation and extreme poverty; of sexual repression, 'My Secret Life' . and a London which shocked even Dostoyevsky. Mr Priestley deals with these - and with the more violent events of the decade (the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny) - with wit, perception and a fine critical sympathy. Large; Heavy. (ISBN: 0140038191). Good.