H. G. Wells opens his satirical, visionary novel The Food of the Gods, published at the turn of the twentieth century in 1904, with a backward glance at a singular novelty that has emerged in the previous fifty years:

Wells nips at the heels of this new class of ‘men’, so unworldly, but so insistent on each his own achievement that they dislike being classed in the gross – and, with a sly refusal to name it, he imports his own gross allusion to that ‘other word’ that asserts the body. Scientists, he suggests, see themselves as all intellect, but are trapped in their shuffling mediocre bodies and their anxious self-assertion.

In Sartor Resartus, as Carlyle reconstructs the auto/biography of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh from the scraps and fragments of his subject’s life, he pauses to wonder at ‘these autobiographical times of ours’. The phrase captures the expressivist turn of the early Victorian era and the explosion of writing in an autobiographical mode. As a word, ‘autobiography’ was virtually a neologism when Sartor Resartus was published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–4. In 1797 it had appeared (negatively) in the Monthly Review as a ‘pedantic’ term; it reappeared (positively) in 1809 in the Quarterly Review when Robert Southey praised the life of the Portuguese painter Francisco Vieira as a ‘very amusing and unique specimen of autobiography’. By 1826 the publishers John Hunt and Cowden Clarke had launched a popular series, Autobiography: A Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves, and by 1828 Carlyle was musing, ‘What would we give for such an Autobiography of Shakspeare.’ The increasingly frequent use of the word ‘autobiography’ in the Victorian period is matched by the increasing number of periodical articles and reviews on the subject: 34 in the 1820s, 127 in the 1840s, 304 in the 1860s, and 433 in the first decade of the twentieth century, according to the Periodicals Index Online. Indeed, from the French perspective, even in 1866 ‘autobiography’ was an English invention, ‘still rare in France but conspicuously common across the Channel’.

‘What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The question is this – Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.’ It was with this pithy, reductive summary that Benjamin Disraeli characterized the popular conception of the challenge that evolutionary explanations of man’s origin and descent offered to Victorian religion. Tennyson put the matter rather more bluntly: ‘We shall all turn into pigs if we lose Christianity and God.’ Darwin’s hypotheses appeared to challenge man’s claim to be more than the sum of his physical and rational parts, raising questions as to where to locate humanity’s inclinations to the mystical, ethical, moral, and aesthetic. Disraeli’s quip reveals the clarity of an assimilated Anglican Jew’s recognition that mid nineteenth-century Britain’s religion was both a very public concern, central to the sense of national culture, and a matter of highly individualized belief.

‘Spirituality’ is nowadays employed as an inclusive term for indicating metaphysical longing, or a sense of the transcendent not easily aligned with, or confined within, particular histories of institutionalized affiliation. Confronted with aeons of geological change, the theory of natural selection, imperial encounters with alternative cultures, and technological advances that challenged previous conceptions of the possible, the Victorian age also witnessed movement away from the orthodoxies of Bible, Church tradition, and shared liturgy, and towards privatized belief systems.

During the Victorian period the landscape of Britain was utterly transformed by unprecedented urban expansion, the movement of populations away from rural areas, and the proliferation of new industrial cities in the north of England. By the middle of the nineteenth century, for the first time in any country in human history, over half the population resided in towns or cities, tipping the balance away from a rural nation. For those Britons used to an agricultural economy and cottage industry, migrating from country to city meant learning how to subsist in a wholly new environment, in which traditional modes of working, dwelling, and even eating were all dramatically altered. Urban dwellers confronted overcrowding, strange and often dangerous working conditions, primitive and filthy living arrangements, polluted water and air, and rapidly spreading epidemic diseases. Factory work meant getting accustomed to new machines, new spaces and rhythms of labour, and reliance on inadequate wages. The configuration of the family changed as women and older children were hired more readily than their more highly paid husbands and fathers and left the home to work. Wives suffered the humiliation of demeaning work conditions, husbands faced unemployment, and, with mothers working outside the home, babies were farmed out to minders. Industrial production created new classes of employers and workers – ‘masters’ and ‘men’ as they were called – and London witnessed the growth of sweated industries and, especially in the last decades of the century, casual labour.

The last book that the eighty-nine-year-old novelist Rebecca West published during her long and distinguished career was 1900: a beautifully illustrated account of the most decisive cultural and political events that occurred not only in Britain but also across the globe during this pivotal year. Amid her wide-ranging discussion of such dispersed phenomena as the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, the tidal wave that swept the Texas coast, and the evident decline in Queen Victoria’s health, West – who took her professional name from Henrik Ibsen’s forthright heroine in Rosmersholm (1886) – turns her attention to the unsettled literary climate in England at the turn of the century. Her inquiries for the most part focus less on drama and poetry and more on fiction: the genre in which she would firmly establish her reputation, some years after she started contributing her frequently irreverent articles – ones that did not hesitate to attack established figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Mary Augusta Ward, and H. G. Wells – to the Clarion (a socialist newspaper founded by Robert Blatchford in 1891) and the Freewoman (a sexually progressive feminist journal published in 1911 and 1912). ‘In Great Britain’, West writes, ‘the literature of 1900 did little to dispel the curious preoccupation of the time. Fiction was the thing and it had developed along perilous lines.

On 22 March 1775, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons with the aim of restoring ‘the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country’: the occasion for his speech was a debate on the wisdom of restricting American trade with England. In a graphic deployment of the familiar metaphor of nation as body, Burke describes England as a fertile but exhausted mother being fed by her American colonies, and to those fellow members of the House who charge America with having unnaturally drawn life from the colonial mother, responds that in 1775 she sustains the nation that was once the selfless protector of her dependent outposts; now is the time for a grateful England to treat those colonies as political allies not as commercial competitors. Whereas at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the American colonies imported corn and grain from England, now the New World feeds the Old, and England should remember that she would have faced a ‘desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of the exhausted parent’.

Given the long-standing ubiquity in British literature of metaphors of the body and colonization – one thinks, for instance, of Donne’s ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’ in which the speaker celebrates his lover’s body as ‘O my America! my new-found-land, / My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d, / My Myne of precious stones, My Empirie, / How blest am I in this discovering thee!’ – it is hardly surprising that Burke fuses body and family when advancing his American argument for collaboration in place of confrontation.

On 13 November 1849, Charles Dickens witnessed the execution of Marie and Frederick Manning at the Horsemonger Road Goal in Southwark, South London. He had rented a flat with a good view for the purpose, he claimed, of observing the responses of the thirty thousand people who had gathered together to watch the occasion – and he described what he saw in a letter to The Times later that day:

He describes the ‘screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs Manning” for “Susannah”, and the like’, and the ‘fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, [which] gave a new zest to the general entertainment’.

The first Victorian generation witnessed what many of them recognized as unprecedented change in the physical and political world about them. It was a sentiment famously described by Thackeray in his ‘Roundabout Paper’ of October 1860 entitled De Juventute. For Thackeray, the coming of the railways in the 1830s seemed to demarcate one age from another and not just his own youth from his middle age:

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, William Blake’s work was rescued from its long obscurity by those, like Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Butler Yeats, who found within it the possibilities for a humanist aesthetic practice that could engage (and possibly transform) the world without being bound to it. Swinburne’s seminal William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868) and Yeats’s eclectic edition of The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) are landmarks of fin-de-siècle literary culture. Together they provide an index to Blake’s importance for late Victorian writers; they also afford insight into many of the period’s characteristic preoccupations and concerns. ‘To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic’, Swinburne writes, adding that Blake ‘walked and laboured under other heavens, on another earth, than the earth and heaven of material life’. As Swinburne makes clear, the crucial distinction is not between (material) earth and (immaterial) heaven but between a mind shackled to material life by the ‘mechanical intellect’ and a mind liberated from that life by what Yeats, referring to Blake, described as ‘the visionary realism’ of the imagination. For these later poets, Blake’s work was most compelling for its recreation of the world – all of heaven and of earth too – within the space of the imagination, a recreation that was also a redemption. Blake knew that ‘imagination was the first emanation of divinity’, writes Yeats, and that ‘the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations’.