Abstract
WHY ‘tragedy’? One reads Dr. Wingfield-Stratford's new and brilliant book through with growing wonder. He meets so fully all the cheap gibes against the last generation—the ineffectual politicians, the hypocritical moralists, the fainting women, and all the rest of it—and shows the contrary truth of an age of exceptional earnestness, industry, and success—“the heyday of idealism and imaginative genius”; and then sums it up as a “tragedy”. What does he mean? Dr. Wingfield-Stratford's answer is that the Victorian middle class was ‘tragic’ because its members went on their earnest and triumphant way quite unwitting of the catastrophe which was to follow and of the greatest social and industrial problem which remained to be solved. The latter was the humanising of the industrial revolution, the widening of the conquest of Nature which the nineteenth century initiated with scientific machinery into a conquest of human conditions, the addition of an ideal of beauty to that of wealth.
The Victorian Tragedy.
Dr. Esmé Wingfield-Stratford. Pp.ix + 296. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1930.) 10s. 6d. net.
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M., F. The Victorian Tragedy . Nature 126, 951 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126951a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126951a0