Victorious Century

The United Kingdom, 1800-1906

By: David Cannadine

Narrated by: Kris Dyer

Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

To live in 19th-century Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent in the human experience. There were revolutions in transport, communication and work; cities grew vast; and scientific ideas made the intellectual landscape unrecognisable. This was an exhilarating time but also a horrifying one.

In his dazzling new book, David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of the British 19th century in all its energy and dynamism, darkness and vice. This was a country which saw itself at the summit of the world. And yet it was a society also convulsed by doubt, fear and introspection. Repeatedly, politicians and writers felt themselves to be staring into the abyss - and what is seen sometimes seen as an era of irritating self-belief was in practice obsessed by a sense of its own fragility, whether as a great power or as a moral force.

Victorious Century is an extraordinarily enjoyable book - its author catches the relish, humour and theatricality of the age but also the dilemmas of a kind with which we remain familiar today. It reframes a time at once strangely familiar and yet wholly unlike our own.

©2017 David Cannadine (P)2017 Audible, Ltd

Interesting book, poorly read

This history is interesting, although not that remarkable. The reader mispronounces quite a number of words, particularly names of people and places. The most egregious, and repeated, misreading is saying, for example, "ten dee in the pound" when reading "10d in the pound". He is apparently unaware that "d" is the historical abbreviation for penny and hence that this should be read as "ten pence in the pound". Such a mispronunciation is the bizarre equivalent of saying "ess ten" when reading "$10".

Great book!

Very lucid and informative study of a dynamic period in English history that is often represented by stereotypes and so is not well understood. The complex issues, tumultuous events, and colorful individuals of a changing and powerful empire are well presented.

Blandly toeing the line between macro and micro

I took issue with the scope of this book. No doubt, David Cannadine has set himself a monumental task by tackling an entire century of Britain's greatest achievements, but to do so effectively, I believe this work should have been twice as long or constructed differently. Victorious Century reads like a continual list of names and abstract verbs, none of which we get to know very well. Even important ministers are easy to forget when they're immersed in myriad other names and quickly disappear. There is also no talk of tangible history at all. Even when an embarrassing incident at a coronation is explicitly mentioned, there's no exposition that details the episode and the narration plows ahead ceaselessly. There are few quotes and those there are last no longer than one or two sentences. Nearly every sentence contains at least one proper noun, but at no point do we ever get an idea of who or what that noun really was. This takes away from the gripping nature of the history and if you zone out or snooze for a little bit, it doesn't feel like anything is lost.

I wish this would either be more macroscopic and delve deeper into the large trends and forces at play or actually illustrate some amount of the history as it occurred. As it stands, I can't say this is anything more than a good, comprehensive introduction that must be accompanied by further, more in depth reading for any of this history to stick or be meaningful.

ambitious but flawed

he author crams so much into this book, that the forest gets lost for the trees. As a result, the history here often seems superficial. The writing often jumps back and forth in time, making it difficult for the reader to get a good sense of what happened when or to get a good sense of the important historical developments of the period.