Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians by Gertrude Himmelfarb

First published: 1986

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians can be best described as a collection of eleven occasional essays. Most appeared first in prestigious periodicals such as The American Scholar, Commentary, The New Criterion, and The New Republic. Several are extended reviews of scholarly monographs, biographies, or collections of letters. The title of the volume may be misleading, since it applies directly only to the first essay in the collection. In all the essays, Himmelfarb is interested in the larger question of the “moral imagination” of the Victorians: a belief in doing the right thing in a society that had substituted right conduct for religious belief as the means of dealing responsibly with the problems of society. For her, this moral imagination was a controlling influence that led the Victorians to do good things for others as well as to adhere to principles that later generations could only ridicule or admire.

Although they are loosely connected by some association with the Victorian age (1837-1901), the essays in this volume range both forward and backward from that period to explore the development of the Victorians’ special brand of morality and to examine the influence of their thought and conduct on succeeding generations. Five selections treat Victorian issues and figures directly. The title essay offers a general survey of the social climate that led men and women to adopt certain attitudes toward morality and society. In it, Himmelfarb responds to conclusions drawn in a scholarly study of five Victorian marriages: Charles and Catherine Dickens, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, John and Effie Ruskin, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (later Harriet Mill), and George Eliot (Marian Evans) and George Henry Lewes. Other essays address topics such as religion, science, morality, and sociobiology. Two others review the influence of historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli on their contemporaries and on succeeding generations.

The remaining six essays, however, focus on people outside the boundaries normally established for the Victorian era. Two deal with the writings of Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher and proponent of utilitarianism who flourished before Victoria ascended the English throne but whose works were highly influential throughout the nineteenth century. One focuses on the writings of social reformer William Godwin, Bentham’s contemporary. Two more concentrate on figures on the periphery of the period: members of the Bloomsbury set, who were the children and grandchildren of eminent Victorian personages; and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, socialist reformers whose careers began late in the nineteenth century and extended well into the twentieth. The concluding essay examines the work of twentieth century philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott.

Women’s issues are discussed most directly in the title essay; the feminist methodology that author Phyllis Rose applied in her study Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983) prompts Himmelfarb to consider the subject of marriage and morals during the period. The role and influence of women in society and their rights and responsibilities in marriage are also investigated in two other essays: her examination of the contributions of the Webbs to social activities in Britain and her exploration of the unusual lifestyles of the Bloomsbury group, which included important women authors and artists such as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Himmelfarb’s commentary on William Godwin contains a brief assessment of Godwin’s remarkable wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, and his daughter, Mary Shelley.

Context

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians is but one of a number of historical studies that have earned for Gertrude Himmelfarb a place among America’s most distinguished historians. Nevertheless, she stands in opposition to the trend among many scholars, especially women scholars, to revise radically the way in which history is viewed and studied. Himmelfarb’s editions of the works of Lord Acton, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill are models of traditional historical scholarship. Similarly, her critical examinations of the Victorian period in works such as Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), Victorian Minds (1968), and The Idea of Poverty (1984) apply a methodology often disdained by feminist scholars.

Himmelfarb is acutely aware of her position within the historical community, and she makes a case for the continuance of her approach throughout the essays collected in The New History and the Old (1987), a work that bears many similarities to Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians. Throughout her writings, she emphasizes the importance of public contributions as a criterion for judging the value of historical figures, and while she does not dismiss colleagues who focus on psychological, sociological, or anthropological approaches to the discipline, she maintains that the view of the past should not be distorted by the application of contemporary standards.

A woman writer who takes such a position is likely to be criticized by more strident liberal authors (both men and women), or even ignored. What makes Himmelfarb’s work important, however, is the wide range of factual knowledge she brings to her study of the Victorian period. Her conclusions are hard to dismiss because they are based on an understanding of what happened and a familiarity with the primary documents upon which historical judgments are usually based. While it would be unwise to call her antitheoretical in her approach to history, it is safe to say that she is unwilling to recognize any larger theoretical framework as being necessary to make sense of the facts she confronts in her study of the past; rather, she adopts the more traditional, and hence less fashionable, attitude that theory should proceed from and be deduced from available evidence.

Bibliography

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The New History and the Old. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. In a second collection of essays, Himmelfarb continues her assessment of the historical process as it has been applied to the study of the nineteenth century. She reiterates her belief that historians must examine the past without preconceptions in order to understand it fully.

Himmelfarb, Gerturde. Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Himmelfarb expands on her idea of the moral imagination of the Victorians by examining the careers of three important activists and writers of the last decades of the nineteenth century: T. H. Green, Alfred Marshall, and Charles Booth. She shows how genuine compassion for the poor was translated into workable schemes for their relief.

McKendrick, Neil. “Defending ‘All the Decent Draperies of Life.’” The New York Times Book Review 91 (March 23, 1986): 9-11. McKendrick has fulsome praise for Himmelfarb’s analysis of the Victorians’ moral consciousness and the reaction of those who inherited their outlook. There is also strong appreciation for the author’s sound judgment of historical figures.

Magnet, Myron. “The Life of Ideas.” Commentary 82 (September, 1986): 58-61. Magnet believes that Himmelfarb restores a balance to twentieth century historians’ tendency to see events of the past through theoretical perspectives invented in the present.

Turner, Frank M. Review of Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians. American Historical Review 92 (June, 1987): 666-667. A distinguished historian praises Himmelfarb for her powerful intellect and her insight into historical issues. Turner commends her for being forthright in criticizing those who would reconstruct the past according to their own standards.