In this provocative book, G.M. Young explores the kaleidoscope of changing ideas, institutions, conventions, and tastes of the Victorian era. Offering a sensitive interpretation of what it meant to live in this age, he records the fresh impressions made by such events as the Fall of Khartoum and the death of Prince Albert, drawing heavily on his own recollections of past conversations and gossip. Young has written this remarkable survey in a style of penetrating scholarship that owes much to Gibbon for its clarity and wit, and to Macaulay for the assembled movement and march of its narrative. Hailed as the greatest single study of the age in any language when it first appeared in print, it remains an essential work on the period.