The 1850s were not only the central and most characteristic decade in the Victorian era but also the time when Victoria and Albert were happiest and most popular with their people. In this beautifully illustrated companion volume to The Prince of Pleasure and The Edwardian Mr Priestley surveys the social, political, industrial, religious, literary and artistic life of this decade.
The 18503 included two of the most significant and emotive conflicts in English history - the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. They also saw a vast expansion of industry and the consolidation of the middle class, whose social and sexual prejudices and contradictions Mr Priestley describes and explains with insight and wit. The violence of religious controversy and the fascination with death, spiritualism and other esoteric experiences were as characteristic of the period as the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species or Mill's essay On Liberty.
In literature it was an age of giants - Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brownings, the Brontes - on all of whom Mr Priestley gives original and perceptive judgments, as he does also on the painters of the period - the 'story' pictures of some of the minor painters who are now coming back into fashion again, the huge 'dream tableaux' of Frith, and the more significant, if strange and mystical, creations of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Both the peaks and depths of mid-Victorian society are explored in this book, and its forty pages of colour plates and numerous monochrome 'illustrations vividly and amusingly mirror the faces, fashions, environment and social usages of a period that has a very special fascination for people today.