Coping with Change: British Society, 1780-1914, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2013, vi + 762, £21.88, paper ISBN 13: 978-1492969129; 10: 1492969125

The title of Richard Brown's revised, composite history of British society unusually draws parallels between Britain today and Britain during the ‘long' nineteenth century. It thus provides a distinctly fresh prism through which to review an era of history, which since Elie Halevy's monumental six-volume study extending over ninety-nine years from 1815 to 1914, has tended to be stretched by historians both backwards into the era which witnessed the acceleration of industrialisation in the late eighteenth century, as well as forwards into the early twentieth century to encompass the cataclysmic outbreak of the First World War. The parallels between Britain today, as Brown points out in his preface, are in many ways striking, providing considerable justification for his re-structuring of the era from this perspective. Both periods, for example, had societies, which it can convincingly be claimed, were coping with substantial and sustained demographic changes. Both societies grappled with issues arising from poverty, housing shortages and exploitation in the workplace and faced concerns about education, crime and the use of leisure. However, the hyperbole is perhaps rather overdrawn in comparing the pervasive presence of the nineteenth century bobby on the beat with the twentieth and twenty-first century surveillance of CCTV and speed cameras and by the comparison of Victorian class-consciousness, vividly illustrated with reference by the end of the period to the rigid class distinctions operating on the ill-fated inaugural voyage of the Titanic, with today's ‘psychotically conscious' obsession with ‘our position in society'.

But this is to linger in the foothills rather than to scale the heights and appreciate the refreshing perspectives revealed by Brown's re-imagining of a formative century for a new generation of readers. Through this bold exercise in the re-structuring of a series of substantial studies previously undertaken between 1987 and 2013, during a quarter of a century which has generated a new readership less familiar with the well-established parameters and tropes of nineteenth-century historiography, Brown has opened new windows into this watershed era of modern British history. Through a series of succinctly headed chapters, he focuses successively on industrial, agricultural, urban, sanitary, social welfare, religious, and leisure changes from the Hanoverians through the Victorians, who claim the lion's share of the book, to the Edwardians. The Titanic disaster is appropriately viewed as a culminating ‘metaphor for the problems and tensions facing society' before 1914. However, as Brown speculates, if ‘the economic and social changes of the late-Victorian and Edwardian years ‘contributed to crisis' it was perhaps unclear to many contemporaries exactly ‘what the crisis represented', especially younger people for whom ‘Victorian ideas and values no longer seemed satisfying'. His own historical judgment is well-grounded and clear, concluding, pessimistically, that ‘Victorian preoccupations with how to manage the problems created by economic and demographic change were largely unresolved by 1914'. Whilst acknowledging that ‘there may have been some improvements in people's quality of life' he reckons that ‘these were small and unevenly distributed' and that ‘for most people, life remained a constant battle for survival to keep above the poverty line especially for the very young and the old'.

The volume, published at a juncture in the history of the United Kingdom when its structural cohesion, economic, social and cultural values will be placed under their closest scrutiny for a century, this impressive tour de force offers a perceptive and balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the political union between England, Wales, Scotland, and even the fragile union with Ireland during the period up to the First World War. Present and future students of history in tertiary and higher education will welcome this accessible study with its selective guide to further reading, supplemented by astute additional detailed guidance provided in the footnotes, and they will remain indebted to an author who has continued to reflect creatively and realistically upon his life's work in a continuing prolific retirement.