This is, no doubt, a naive view of social change. That does not render it false. How might it have been true? It would have demanded an intelligent ruling class and a responsible intelligentsia. Tocqueville believed that both existed, uniquely, in the England of his day. It also would have required a free, yet deferential, people. Bagehot insisted that his contemporaries fit that bill as well. Finally, it presumed the possibility of a religious revival. Victorian England tamed the subversive insights of political economy through the timeless demands of Protestant dogma. It also softened the unyielding authority of statute law in the subtle kindness of Christian charity. This permitted material advance to be matched by moral improvement. Indeed, it understood that the two truly progressed only together.  That is why Heffer rightly concludes that, "the pursuit of perfection, a minority activity in 1838, had become almost an obligation by 1880."

My only quibble with this magnificent book lies in its argument that all of this somehow made "modern Britain". It certainly created a self-consciously modern society here, after 1850. The Victorians repudiated their 18th-century predecessors every bit as determinedly as we, it seems, have since rejected them. They were appalled by Georgian England's nominal faith, superficial politeness and profound cruelties. They meant to do away with each. The abolition of slavery throughout the 19th-century Anglosphere demonstrates just how much they attempted — and achieved — in these ends.

But their High Minds also gave birth to a world whose sincere faithfulness was as much defined by, as subverted through, their characteristic agnosticism; similarly, whose commitment to general improvement was as much reflected in, as limited by, the otherwise peculiar fact that in 1914 this country remained one of just two in Europe to lack the universal male franchise. That world did not survive the Second World War, not in this country at least. It has now all but disappeared, in this country above all. Certainly, the curious combination of complacency and complaint that characterises our contemporary culture would have mystified just as much as it would have appalled the High Minds delineated and celebrated in this gloriously detailed narrative.