Self-belief and fragility
Historian David Cannadine takes a look at the British nineteenth century in all its energy and dynamism, darkness and vice – an exhilarating time, but also a horrifying one, with revolutions in transport, communication and work, cities growing vast; and scientific ideas making the intellectual landscape unrecognisable. 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 – a time at once strangely familiar and yet wholly unlike our own.