Laudator Temporis Acti

G.M. Trevelyan, "Introducing the Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians," in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (1949; rpt. London: Sylvan Press, 1950), pp. 15-19 (at 17-18):

And it was the England and Scotland of the nineteenth century that supplied the population of those new lands. The birthrate in all classes was so high that our industrial expansion at home was rendered possible. The population of Great Britain rose from under twelve millions in 1811 to thirty-seven millions in 1901. And during those same years the tide of emigration founded these new Britains overseas. As we should not now be capable of peopling vast empty territories, it is as well that we did it just in time, while we were still a very prolific race.

A century of peace, security and wealth was in many respects favourable to the higher aspects of civilisation. In the nineteenth century our fortunate ancestors were not precluded by national poverty from obtaining the books they wanted to study, from making or buying beautiful things or from travelling to see them. The shores and mountains of their own island were opened to them by the new railways, and they had free access to the Alps, to Italy and all the ancient lands of Europe, made significant to them by their study of history and the Classics, by the writings of Shelley and Byron, Ruskin and Browning. It was an age of cheap and rapid book production, patronised by a very large leisured and semi-leisured class, and by prosperous professional and artisan classes. There was a very large public for the many good writers whom England then produced out of these same leisured and professional classes—poets, novelists, historians, scholars, essayists, humorists; many of their names are still household words today, even if too few now read their books. It was a time of active political, philosophical and religious speculations, carried on in an atmosphere of freedom, with the impact of Darwin and Huxley to stimulate it with new conceptions of the universe. It was good, serious stuff that was read. The competition of cheap journalism and literature, aimed at the lowest level of intelligence, only became dangerous at the latter end of the century.