Jeremy Paxman’s The Victorians uses the paintings of the Victorian Age to paint a picture of the lives of the men and women who lived through a time filled with upheaval and investigation, darkness and discovery, a vibrant sense of purpose and a new perception of the purpose of art itself. Paxman deftly weaves the stories found on the paintings themselves with the lives of the men and women who painted them and the people who bought, criticized, and became the subjects of paintings that were “the cinema of their day.”

This book is a companion to Paxman’s BBC series with the same name and much of it will sound familiar to those who watched the series when it aired. The book does an excellent job of inserting prints of the paintings described, and Paxman’s descriptions are often enough to understand the story he is telling even if the painting itself was unavailable. The importance of the paintings to the story is evident, and the decision to include a number of colour prints really adds to the richness of the conclusions that Paxman draws from the art and the world that surrounded it.

The focus of the book ranges as much as the subjects of the paintings. Paxman begins with the “mob in the picture gallery” and the reality that the sweeping vistas and “ordinary” people that began appearing in Victorian art delighted the middle class that swept into galleries (sometimes in the millions) to see that paintings that reflected everyday life around them. Whether it was a scene at the races, filled with everyone from con artists to wealthy mistresses, or a painting celebrating the very Victorian value of hard work and industry, the paintings served as more than representation of an era, they recorded, supported, and reinforced the values that the Victorians held close and echoed the noise and tumult of the time:

Victorian painters, though, were slow to look this brave new world in the eye. Manchester, as we have already seen, was better viewed from a safe distance–or so many artists of the time felt, and painted accordingly. Later, they would descend from their fastnesses and engage with life on the streets, but in the pictures that many Victorian artists painted of ordinary people at this time, we see the same unwilingness to look hard at the world that was taking shape around them.

The echo in the art was not merely one of congratulation or support, Paxman also shows how the art of the time was often a commentary on the social realities of the Victorian world. Work houses, debtors prisons, child labour, and the mills of industry all saw themselves reflected, for good or ill, in the art of the time; art that could, sometimes, help push for reforms of the world it reflected.

Paxman neatly ties his conclusions to the art, and the connection between the art and the Victorian world enriches both the history and the art in a book that serves as a window to “the birth of modern Britain.”

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