Victorian America and the Civil War. By Anne C. Rose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. vii, 304, ISBN 0-521-41081-9.

            This book looks to examine how the Civil War came to effect the beliefs and epistemologies of Victorian Americans. It is serious (and relevant) intellectual and cultural history. Surveying a host of Victorian Americans all across the nation—seventy-five of America’s middle to upper-middle class born from 1815 to 1837—Anne Rose addresses thematically such issues as religion, work, leisure, family, and politics. The author draws primarily from autobiographies, memoirs, and letters to connect with her Victorians. Somewhat predictably, Rose devotes significant space to significant Americans in her work: Henry David Thoreau, Ulysses Grant, Emily Dickinson, and Mary Chestnutt (to name a few) serve as convenient subjects because they left behind voluminous writings. The war wrought on all these persons a crisis of belief. The legacy of the Civil War in Victorian America, according to Rose, was the triumph of kind of humanistic romanticism.

Religion, though not central to this thesis, does flow throughout the work as perhaps the strongest undercurrent. “The central religious experience of American Victorians,” Rose writes, “was the quiet erosion of inherited patterns of feeling, belief, and practice in the course of their adult lives.” These folks “…surprised themselves, as time went on, by how secular they had imperceptibly become” (17). And, Victorian America witnessed “the rise of a sensuous and often secular culture of unprecedented range and depth” (24). It remains somewhat unclear throughout the work what, exactly, Rose means by orthodox religion. Americans remained an intensely religious people well into the twentieth century, and this reviewer couldn’t help but think that the author fails to divorce evangelical Protestant belief—indeed, a waning force in American society after the war—from religiosity—something Americans retained with great fervor into the Victorian people as the rise of the social gospel movement and spiritualism during The Great War seem to suggest.

            As the work’s chapters intimate, Rose concerns herself primarily with the private lives of her Victorian historical subjects. The centrality of politics to the Victorian people supplanted religious fervor. Family activities shifted within the home from such leisurely practices as reading to more outward forms of social engagement. Rose claims that “the Civil War impelled the Victorians to explore the intricacies of leisure and provided them with a way to come closer to making their peace with pleasure seeking” (143). The Victorian Period also proved a significant time for kindling national memory. Victorians “engaged enthusiastically in activities commemorating their national crisis” (141). Many joined veterans organizations and attended reunions. Historical societies grew in membership and emerged as viable forums for patriotic “rituals,” “vehicles for political pressure,” and “places to act out ambivalent feelings about progress” (141).

            Rose offers an intimate look into the lives of families in chapter four. Families shifted from traditional “patriarchal” structures to patterns “paternalistic” (147). Men viewed human sexuality within marriage with mixed reactions of enthusiasm, revulsion, and silence. Wives spoke rarely of passion, and imputed the sexual impulse onto men only. On the whole, Victorians “worried that conjugal bonds might grow so strong that the bounds of individualities were obscured.” They cherished privacy (155). Rose attributes the wide age gaps between husbands and wives (not atypical in that era) as representative of the prized relationship between fathers and daughters. Moreover, suitors felt endlessly the need for fiscal independence before taking a wife.

            This book offers a fascinating portrayal of the Victorians. Rose demonstrates a mastery of the sources and offers a well-written and engaging account of the period in question. Less certain, however, is the centrality of the Civil War itself to this narrative. While the work’s key players experienced the Civil War, this reviewer found it more difficult to accept that the generalizations at which Rose arrives concerning the Victorian era bear out that period’s true interconnectedness with the conflict itself. Criticisms notwithstanding, Victorian Americans and the Civil War stands as a fine example of an attempt to broaden the scope and relevance of Civil War memory, intellectual, and cultural studies.

MITCHELL G. KLINGENBERG

Texas Christian University