Victorian

Herbert Spencer: The Philosopher of Evolution

Engineer, journalist, inventor, Herbert Spencer became one of the most influential prophets of the Victorian Age. J.W. Burrow describes how his Synthetic Philosophy was an encyclopedic attempt to construct a system of “unified knowledge,” in which the facts of Darwinian natural science were blended with transcendental metaphysics.

Garnet Wolseley: Soldier of Empire

 “I am a Jingo in the best acceptation of that sobriquet... To see England great is my highest aspiration, and to lead in contributing to that greatness is my only real ambition.” By Edgar Holt. 

Friedrich Engels and the England of the 1840s

W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chalonert describe how it was from incomplete evidence, and in a spirit of political prejudice, that Engels compiled his famous account of the condition of the British working-classes.