Paternalism in Early Victorian England by David Roberts Rutgers
University Press, 337 pp., $22.50 Barclay Fox’s Journal edited
by R. L. Brett Rowman and Littlefield, 426 pp., $23.50
Aristocracy and the People: Britain 1815-1865 by Norman Gash
Harvard University Press (New History of England series), 384
pp., $20.00 Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images of
the Industrial Revolution by Asa Briggs Thames and Hudson, 208
pp., $16.95 Only seven or eight generations—a short span as
human history goes—separate us from the start of the first
industrial revolution. The first iron bridge in the world
celebrated its bicentennial in 1979. It is natural that
historians should turn their attention to the first phase of the
first industrial society, from which we are all in various ways
descended: early nineteenth-century Britain. In spite of the
preference of the ideologists of the period and of later
historians for such terms as “improvement,” the transformation
of Britain was revolutionary. How revolutionary i