Jeremy Paxman takes his love of Victorian paintings as the starting point for a journey into Victorian Britain. Such pictures may not be fashionable today, but they are a goldmine of information about the most dynamic age in British history.

He investigates the most dramatic event of Victorian Britain: the explosion of great cities. At first the Victorians feared these new monsters in their midst, but then grew to love and transform them.

Jeremy explores the canals and sewers, suburbs and back streets, workhouses and magnificent buildings of the great Victorian city, while also picturing the fun-filled chaos of Derby Day.

Jeremy Paxman takes his love of Victorian paintings as the starting point for a journey into Victorian Britain.

In The Victorians, Jeremy Paxman offers his personal take on the most important and influential period of our national past. Using the paintings of the era as his starting point – in his view, the one mode of Victorian art yet to be rescued from indifference – Paxman explores themes of family, urban life, industry, empire, and imagination to uncover truths (and explode some myths) about Victorian Britain.

To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, immensely popular visual narratives that attracted crowds by the hundreds of thousands: a single picture show featuring Elizabeth Butler’s Balaclava (depicting survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade) drew 50,000 viewers, some of them openly weeping. The Victorians shows how artists like Butler, William Powell Frith, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Luke Fildes, and Ford Madox Brown were chronicling a world changing before their eyes, and his overview ranges across the whole of Victorian life and culture: from high gothic architecture to the birth of the football league, from the novels of Dickens to the technological marvels of Brunel.

Published to coincide with a landmark BBC series, The Victorians is an opinionated, informed, surprising, and hugely enthusiastic appraisal of the birth of modern Britain - a glorious reminder of how the Victorians made us who we are today.

In The Victorians, Jeremy Paxman offers his personal take on the most important and influential period of our national past.

In The Victorians, Jeremy Paxman offers his personal take on the most important and influential period of our national past

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