Historical Eras

"How is one statute against murder or rape or theft different from any other?” I said, though my mind had careened into a hundred different questions. “They are different in that they come from a god who says we are to show honor of him by honoring others. And so as we feed our hungry neighbor and do not steal from him we honor not our neighbor, but the image of the One who fashioned him. You say our god has no face. This is not true. Yaweh’s face is before us in every person we see, as we are made in his image. Living people who require more kindness and adoration than any idol."

"I will go and see whether he is wise or not, and I will come to test him with riddles."

"Your father is my father; your grandfather, my husband; you are my son, and I am your sister"

"understanding. Do we wish our children to do as they are told forever, simply because we told them what they should do, or because they fear punishment? Or do we hope that they grow in understanding to discern for themselves and freely choose right?"

"What is love, but to hold dear without expectation? What is love, but first given devotion? What is love . . . But freedom."

"The history keepers will no doubt tell their own tale, and the priests another. It is the men's accounts that seem to survive a world obsessed with conquest, our actions beyond bedchamber and hearth remembered only when we leave their obscurity. And so we become infamous because we were not invisible, the truth of our lives ephemeral as incense."

"But I did not believe the reports [of your wisdom] until I came and saw with my own eyes that not even the half had been told me; your wisdom and wealth surpass the reports that I heard. How fortunate are your men and how fortunate are these your courtiers, who are always in attendance on you and can hear your wisdom! Praised be the Lord your God, who delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel. It is because of the Lord’s everlasting love for Israel that He made you king to administer justice and righteousness."

"You are truly wise, now I will ask you something, and we shall see if you are capable of answering me."

"our love is proved when we love those who are not beautiful, who wound with word or deed. When we love not out of pity, or even for their sakes, but for our own. And here is the secret: they do not wound us, as Yaweh does not wound us. We wound ourselves by allowing the offense. And so Yaweh commands forgiveness for our own healing. Because in honoring ourselves—and others as ourselves—we please and honor Yaweh, who looks not on what a person does, but on the heart.” I"

"A weak man declares a woman a temptress and orders her to cover herself. A strong man covers himself and says nothing."

"What are the seven that issue and nine that enter, the two that offer drink, and the one that drinks."

"... While the Elizabethan world was still going on — and in some respects it was still continuing, in modified form, until the Second World War — British and American historians were able to see the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as a glory age. This was how the Elizabethans saw themselves. Their great plot, Edmund Spenser, named his Faerie Queene (who was a projection of Elizabeth herself) Gloriana, and her capital, an idealized London, he named Cleopolis — the Greek for 'Glory-ville'. Modern historians from, let us say, James Anthony Froude (1819–84) to (1903–97) wrote about the Elizabethan Age with celebratory brio. They note, correctly, that this was the age when the history of modern England (and Wales) really began."

"In many respects the Elizabethan era is a turning point in English history. Above all, it was a time of economic expansion in which Shakespeare's kinsmen were led to search for new markets in various parts of their contemporary world. It meant the achievement of a greater initiative on the high seas, and a decisive settlement of accounts with Spain, brought about by the defeat of the in 1588. That victory marked the beginning of English domination of the Atlantic. But the Elizabethan era was also a time of enormous progress in the realm of English culture, a time when Renaissance literature flourished and advances were made in the theatre, in the arts and in science, and in the whole field of material and artistic achievement. This noteworthy advance in civilization was to a large extent the result of England's economic and social development during the sixteenth century."

"The Elizabethans were passionate admirers of the exotic; eager importers of the new and foreign styles in food and dress as in building."

"The age of Walpole was rough, coarse, brutal; a world for the muscular and the aggressive and the cunning. The thin veneer of elegance and classic form obscured but never hid either the crime and dissipation or the drab middle-class virtue and thrift. For the majority of England, life was hard and vile, but the expanding world of commerce and the rich harvests brought both prosperity and opportunity, which bred a boundless self-confidence."

"In the eighteenth century the English working man—then called the jolly yeoman or the industrious ’prentice—was intensely British, boasted himself a free-born Briton, and had no use for the frog-eating, priest-ridden Frenchman of his imagination. The average Englishman had not made the Grand Tour, and had no information about foreigners such as is being constantly poured in upon us to-day through newspapers, cinemas, books, pamphlets, and photographs. What the common English thought of the French you can see in Hogarth's uncomplimentary picture, entitled ‘Calais Gate’, in the National Gallery. This contempt for, and ignorance of, foreigners was extended not only to the Irish, but even to the Scots—who only became understood and admired in England in the age of Walter Scott, partly through the powerful influence of his pen."

"The appetite of England had been whetted by the rapid commercial expansion. A world of never-ending luxury could be won by vigorous and aggressive action against her competitors; so it seemed to many of London's merchants. That war would bring commercial wealth was a deep-seated belief which influenced English politics profoundly."

"William Warburton's Alliance between Church and State was published at the time of greatest strain in 1736. It offered a realistic defence of the position of the Church, one which abandoned all pretensions to an independent authority, and yet laid on the State a clear duty of protection. It was strongly approved by Sherlock and the court. In time it came to be seen as the classic statement of complacent Georgian Erastianism and a mark of the stable relationship between religion and politics in mid-eighteenth-century England."

"There was therefore in eighteenth-century England, prior to the changes gradually made manifest by the Industrial Revolution, a national solidarity and unity of idea which bound Englishmen of all classes together and separated them from foreigners. Power, as we think looking back, was unduly concentrated in the hands of one class, the country gentry, but their monopoly was not popularly regarded as a grievance. The novelist Fielding is one of the very few contemporary critics of squirarchical power in the mid-eighteenth century. Classes were distinct in England—less distinct and rigid, indeed, than on the Continent at that time, but much more distinct and rigid than they are to-day. Wealth was very unevenly distributed. But there was little or no social discontent, and the national idea made every one proud of being a free-born Englishman."

"With regard to the continent of Europe, the popular impression that the eighteenth century was effete and conventional has at least a certain relation to truth... But when we turn to the Britain of the period we have a different story to tell. This was the time when our fathers conquered Canada and half India, rediscovered and began to settle Australia, and traded on an ever-increasing scale all over the inhabited globe; reorganized British agriculture on modern methods; began the Industrial Revolution in our island, thence in later times to spread over the whole world; and if the thirteen American colonies were at the same time lost to the British Empire, it was the result less of decadence in Great Britain than of young and mutinous energies in English America."

"The eighteenth-century English, on the average, were an earnest, virile, original, unconventional, and energetic race."

"Whether or not I am right in supposing that the England of the eighteenth century had an energy of spirit that was lacking elsewhere in the Europe of that day, it is at least certain that this view was then generally held upon the Continent. After the Marlborough wars with which the century opened, and, still more after the great victories of Chatham in two hemispheres in the Seven Years War, foreigners were always asking each other what was the secret of English success, and the answer they found was that the secret lay in our free institutions. In the days of Charles I and II our Parliament had been regarded abroad as a source of confusion and weakness to England. But the course of William III's and Marlborough's wars had changed that view completely. For the British Parliament had defeated the all-worshipped despotism of Louis XIV in a long-drawn contest, in which England had proved supreme alike in land warfare, in sea warfare, in diplomacy, and in financial strength. This unexpected event gave a prestige to our institutions which coloured European thought from the time of Marlborough right down to the French Revolution. The prosperity of England under Walpole, the constant increase of her trade and maritime power, her victories under Chatham in Canada and India, all confirmed the same impression. Even our great catastrophe—the loss of the American Colonies—was read in France as another demonstration of the power that freedom gives. It was not only our Parliament that was admired, but freedom of speech, press, person, and religious toleration."

"The success of the slave trade agitation has obscured a great deal of the Sect's other social work. Active Christianity was the panacea for the world's ills; in consequence, education and missionary enterprise were more important to the Sect than the more direct ameliorations of social conditions, such as control of child labour, shorter working hours, cheap food, and higher wages. They and their supporters set up schools for the poor, especially Sunday Schools for ragged children, which were interested principally in the inculcation of morals and Christian principles, as narrowly interpreted by Simeon or Wilberforce. Not only the poor received their attention, but also the wealthy and middle classes, and, in spite of much aggressive opposition, prudish piety began slowly to replace that frank cynicism which had been the hall-mark of eighteenth-century fashion."

"Trade was a national preoccupation and the constant concern of Parliament and the government, for all his contemporaries were agreed with Defoe that trade was the cause of England's increasing wealth. The trade of England, both overseas and domestic, was extremely rich and varied, based partly on things made or grown at home and partly on an extensive re-export trade of raw materials from the colonies in America and luxury goods from the East. In order to encourage trade, Walpole removed all restrictive measures on the export of English manufactured goods. He also allowed into the country the raw materials needed for them duty free. But, of course, there was no general tendency towards free trade. Everyone, including Walpole, believed that English manufacturers had to be protected at all costs. The Irish were forbidden to make cloth or export their wool to anywhere but England in case the greatest of all English industries – cloth manufacture – should be endangered in any way. This fear of foreign competition was at times carried to fantastic lengths: it was an offence to shear sheep within four miles of the coast in case the fleeces should be smuggled overseas. Yet this attitude – absurd as it might be in many manifestations – was fundamentally realistic. Eighteenth-century politicians realised with great clarity that wealth meant power. Chatham, who was more preoccupied with England's grandeur than any other statesman, planned his campaigns with the merchants of London and planned them to capture French trade. For trade was wealth and wealth was power."

"Out of doors, crime was rife and often bloody: smugglers had little compunction about slaying excise officers. And, from the rough-house of the crowd to the dragoons' musket volley, violence ran through public and political life, as English as plum pudding. Force was used as a matter of routine to achieve social and political goals, smudging hard-and-fast distinctions between the world of criminality and politics."

"Unlike most of Europe, Britain had no censorship and its political press was both more sophisticated and more widely distributed than that of any other European nation – few continental periodicals ever approached the extensive circulation of the Gentleman's Magazine, even Paris had no daily press before 1777 and certainly the obscenity and scurrility found daily in English cartoons, ballads, plays and pamphlets would never have been tolerated by continental rulers. Moreover London had a political significance quite unlike that of any other European capital. Europe's largest urban community – dominating the nation to the extent that one-sixth of the population spent part of their working life there – was endowed (unlike Paris, its nearest rival) with an autonomous and surprisingly democratic municipal government and within its parliamentary constituencies with a very broad electorate, both of which were the seed-grounds of political education and urban radicalism. The extent of political liberty enjoyed in England (as its natives were proud of reminding themselves) and the degree of political sophistication – even if largely, though by no means completely, confined to the metropolis – were greater than in any other European nation."

"Upright citizens – not just blackguards and bravoes but the village Hampden too – did not shrink from force to get their due. There was a cacophony of verbal violence: newspapers, cartoons and street ballads blasted their targets with scabrous insults and Billingsgate scurrility; political sermons thundered from pulpits."

"The life that the English gentry lived was as different as possible from that of their continental friends. The nobles of France and Italy thought little of existence away from the Court of their master, the King or reigning Duke. But the English gentry, when they came to town, came first and foremost to their own Parliament, only secondarily to the King's Court... But the bulk of their lives the English gentlemen spent neither at Court nor yet in the purlieus of Parliament, nor in London at all; but in the country, among their neighbours of all classes whom they led, entertained, bullied, and at election time courted and bribed. It was to their country houses that they brought back the art treasures they had collected on the Grand Tour—treasures in our day being scattered oversea by the auctioneer's hammer. They lived among their neighbours, hunting foxes, shooting partridges, inclosing and draining land, improving breeds of sheep and cattle, governing the countryside as Justices of the Peace. Their whole manner of life and way of thought was English, and though every English gentleman was recognized as belonging to the same social level as the continental nobleman, he was also recognized as belonging to a separate and unique island species of the genus European gentleman."

"The lava flow of violence ran through the political landscape, sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface. Unpopular politicians were often ragged, peers' carriages pelted and rocked, and their windows smashed, as they left Westminster... Minorities were tempting targets. Methodists were treated as cockshies (John Wesley saw it as a mark of Divine favour that no brick hit him personally), as were homosexuals, witches, bawds and Frenchmen. The Act of 1753 legalizing the naturalization of Jews brought baying anti-Semitic mobs on to the streets: it was immediately repealed. Irish-baiting and Scots-baiting were national sports. Fear of popery sparked the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, though targets broadened to include the rich, Lord Mansfield, breweries and Newgate goal."

"It is often the custom to think of the eighteenth century, prior to the French Revolution, as a period of effete politeness and intelligence, of cultured and artificial decadence, of scepticism, atrophy, and want of enterprise... With regard to the continent of Europe, there is a certain amount of symbolical truth in this popular impression, but, for Britain, a more illuminating picture of the eighteenth century would be supplied by a vision of something more robust—Clive planted four-square across the breach of Arcot; Wolfe and his men scrambling up the precipitous forest track towards Quebec; Captain Cook's sails sweeping into Botany Bay; Wesley's lean face and long white hair, as he preaches to mass meetings of miners and throws powerful men into fits of hysteria; James Watt working in the instrument maker’s shop, with thoughts in him that shall have their consequences in the history of mankind"

"In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, naval bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners."

"In the Gilded Age, a generation of American collectors and art historians and museum professionals came to their understanding of what interested them in Italian Renaissance art in significant part by reading Berenson's work and by listening to him talk. In Berenson's descriptions, they heard echoes of their own interests—in scientific experiment and in the progress of humanism—and of their own deep involvement in commerce."

"In some ways, the late nineteenth century was a time of spectacular excess, of brass-knuckled business and shady politics, a long national carnival of fraud and bribery. These qualities appalled middle-class reformers and some later historians, who gave the times such labels as the Gilded Age, the Era of Excess, and the Great Barbecue."

"Wealth generated by Wall Street and industrial labor fueled a housing boom of opulent Fifth Avenue mansions, gable-roof apartment flats, and rows of shabby tenements."

"Paralleling the expansion of the American working class was the dramatic growth, both in numbers and wealth, of the middle and upper classes. For this reason, one of several terms used for the post-Reconstruction years is the Gilded Age. The term, first used by Mark Twain in a novel about economic and political corruption after the Civil War, captured both the riches and superficiality of the wealthier classes in the late nineteenth century."

"What brighter jewel in a Sovereign's crown, what nobler record of a reign, than the fact that it witnessed the children's emancipation, that it released from toil in tender years the sons and daughters of the poor? The success of the Factory Acts has suggested other measures intended to make less oppressive the labour of those who, being, it is supposed, unable to bargain for themselves, need the protection of the Legislature; and this group of laws will be an enduring monument, if not of the wisdom of the Victorian age, of its solicitude for the welfare of its wards."

"No class in the community has more reason to be satisfied with the results of the last sixty years than the working men. Into that period have been crowded a series of economic changes, on the whole making for their comfort, and of reforms which have made them the envy of the same classes in other countries. They have got their "Six Points," or something better. It was the utmost demand of their best friends at the beginning of the present reign that they should be free to work out, by combination or otherwise, in their own way, their salvation, that their societies should be legalized, and that the criminal law should not be used to increase the power of capital—in a word, that they should suffer from no disabilities. They find themselves in 1897 in the position of a privileged or favoured class, fenced about with special legislation, and possessed of some rights denied to others. And this period has also been for them one of unexampled material prosperity. Their wages have risen, while the prices of food and most articles of consumption have fallen. The State educates their children gratis. The State makes the acquisition of allotments easy for them. The municipalities give them recreation-grounds and free libraries."

"The contrast between the labour laws of 1837 and those passed in 1875 is the contrast between harshness and mercy, distrust of the working classes and confidence in them."

"When I speak of Victorian values, I mean respect for the individual, thrift, initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, respect for others and their property, and all the other values that characterised the best of the Victorian era."

"Audrey Russell: Do you think that there may be a reversal and that certain very strict standards may suddenly follow the present age? Mary Stocks: Well it could happen. You see, it did in the first half of the nineteenth century, didn't it? When there was a reaction against the sort of extreme libertarianism of the late eighteenth century."

"I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons – not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or – the phrase I originally used – ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had away of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’."

"Could some one who had emigrated from our shores sixty years ago return to-day he would scarcely recognize in the ordinary working men the sons or grandsons of the working men whom he knew. He would note that their dress and that of their families were much improved; they wear better clothes than their masters wore in 1837. They eat and drink better food and drink than was then within their reach; and, with the price of wheat which has ruled in recent years, they know nothing of the sharp pressure of want, the periodic returns of semi-starvation which then visited large masses of men. Such an observer would find that the working-man's house was more commodious and better furnished, and, if his tastes kept him from the publichouse, had its little store of luxuries and ornaments. Model dwellings are erected for him... If he is ill, hospitals which he does little to support receive him... Should he or his sons be studious, there are free libraries, institutions which, at convenient hours, give him sound instruction, and plenty of people disposed to applaud his efforts to better his lot or enlarge his intelligence. In short, he is better fed, better clothed, better housed, better paid, better educated, lives longer, probably, as a rule, weighs more than his father or grandfather."

"The Victorian Age was in its essence liberal, a time of continuous progress in humanity, in enlightenment, in the welfare of the masses; a time in which an aristocracy was, on the whole, in power but was continually resigning its privileges or extending them to classes hitherto excluded. The statesmen of that time thought of themselves not as leaders of a class, but rather as ‘Shepherds of the People’, concerned with the good of the flock but somewhat aloof from it."

"[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind."

"Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical."

"Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court"."

"There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age."

"Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”"

"The gentleman of the nineteenth century had broken, once Victorianism loomed on the horizon, with the wild and liberalistic vagaries of his forefathers. His background was frequently middle class and in England it was the influence of the Low Church which molded his type. He was deadly afraid to be different. On the Continent it was compulsory military service and in England the public school which fostered the herd instinct. To be different was treason and indecency. The religious principles of old were replaced by taboos. The return to primitive society had begun."

"Take another look at the graph showing illegitimacy from the 1500s up to the present, and focus on the period from 1850–1900. It would be hard to find a time or place in which industrialisation and urbanisation were faster, more sweeping, or more wrenching than in Victorian England. And yet during that same period, illegitimacy went down, not up (crime also dropped, amazingly). The Victorian middle class was superbly efficient at propagating its values throughout society, and its success overcame the naturally disruptive forces of modernisation."