The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 by Michael Wheeler (review)

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• The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 by Michael Wheeler
• Dominic Rainsford (bio)

Michael Wheeler. The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845. Cambridge UP, 2023. Pp. xviii + 466. £29.99. ISBN 978-1-009-26885-1 (hb).

The historical/literary "year book" is something of a twenty-first century publishing phenomenon, ranging from Eric H. Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed to Christopher Bray's 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born – and probably beyond. There are at least two books just about 1922 (Jackson and Rabaté). Well-received examples pegged to a single literary author include James Shapiro's Shakespeare books, centered on 1599 and 1606 respectively; and something comparable has been done for Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, whose Turning Point is about both Dickens and "the World" in 1851. The book on 1845 to be considered here, however, is most clearly comparable with those that have attended to the social, cultural, and political history of a single Victorian year while drawing upon a fairly broad range of literary authors. Michael Wheeler's notable predecessors in this more specific category include Carl Dawson, whose Victorian Noon concerned 1850, and Rosemary Ashton, whose One Hot Summer told us about 1858 (including, in both cases, a lot about Dickens).

Dawson, in 1977, asks himself whether there is "after all, any intrinsic connection between the literary events of a given year?" and admits to having "no overriding thesis" (xii, xiii) – but assures his readers that ample proof of the pudding will be discovered in the eating. Ashton, seeing herself as contributing to what, by 2017, was a well-established genre of "microhistory," makes a more formal claim for the heuristic value of a methodology that "can uncover hitherto hidden connections, patterns, and structures" (5). Wheeler does not refer to these or any other previous "year books," but a view similar to Ashton's is implicit in The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age. He acknowledges "that history is not neatly parcelled up into calendar years and that some of [his] stories extend into the months that precede and follow 1845," but he believes "that Victorian England defined itself in [End Page 275] response" to a particularly powerful set of interrelated "challenges" in what John Forster, in The Life of Charles Dickens, calls "that prodigious year of excitement and disaster" (qtd. Wheeler, Year 8).

The most important of these "challenges," or "crises," in Wheeler's view, occurred "in the workhouses […]; in parliament, where a failed harvest and potato blight in Ireland made Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws inevitable; in the established Church of England […]; and in the expanding railway system" (7). These topics are dealt with, respectively, in chapter 3, "Poor Law Bastille: The Andover Workhouse Scandal"; chapters 7 and 8, on the Oxford Movement and Newman's conversion to Catholicism; chapter 11, "A Prime Minister Resigns: Peel and the Corn Laws"; and chapter 2, "The Railway Juggernaut: Delane, Dickens and the Press." The first crisis that Wheeler deals with, however, is perhaps more obscure, but has a particular value for what can be seen as an intermittently unifying principle of the book. In his first chapter, he describes the scandal that erupted when the Post Office was found to have surreptitious opened and craftily re-sealed letters addressed to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini while the latter was living in London – with the authority of Sir James Graham, the home secretary, and apparently at the behest of the Italian government. This led to long debates in Parliament in 1844–45, in which many of Charles Dickens's friends and acquaintances were involved – mostly, but not always, against the government. Thomas Babington Macaulay, for example, "argued that turning the Post Office, with its monopoly for the safe transmission of letters, into an 'engine of the police' was 'utterly abhorrent to the public feeling'" (26). Thomas Carlyle was also sonorously indignant (25). But Richard Monckton Milnes defended Graham (21). It is a story of governmental overreach and moral compromise that one can well imagine being repeated, albeit with different technology, in our own time...