History of Our Own Times From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880, Volume I

The age when Britain ruled the world, told by a man who watched it happen. Justin McCarthy, an Irish MP writing in the 1870s, captures Victoria's Britain at its swaggering, uncertain height: an empire stretching from Afghanistan to Canada, an industrial revolution reshaping every corner of life, and a political class of titans, Gladstone and Disraeli, locked in their great duel for the soul of the nation. But McCarthy refuses to tell history from the throne alone. He drags the reader onto the famine-stricken streets of Ireland, into the smoking factories of Manchester, onto the battlegrounds of the Crimean War. This is Victorian England not as nostalgia but as lived reality, with all its contradictions: progress and poverty, empire and exploitation, reform and resistance. Written by a liberal who admires the age yet refuses to flatter it, this is history with a conscience.