Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction

Chronologically confusing, following themes rather than a reign by reign or government by government approach.

My overall impression of this British history series is that they work better as refresher courses rather than introductions, despite the titles.

An excellent Very Short Introduction to the history of Britain in the Nineteenth Century. A lot of things I recall from grammar school in the 1960s but much more I do not recall being taught at all - poverty, taxation, women, trades unions, the Left and the rise of what became the Labour Party, agriculture ...

This appears to be a CliffNotes version of a longer textbook. It requires a fair amount of knowledge of English history background, the subject is so vast that names, events and places are not explained by assumed to be understood. It's sort of the worst of all worlds, a text loaded with dry statistics and no central "big picture", then condensed. Parts are good, worth skimming through and picking out the sections and chapters of interest and for the recent bibliography.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd

Really short into to the Nineteenth Century in Britain. Short, but informative.

A Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely urban and English. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew show the forces behind Britain's rise to its imperial zenith, and the continuing tensions within the nations and classes of the 'union state'.

Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew were both brought up and educated in Edinburgh. Harvie went via the Open University to become Professor of British and Irish Studies at Tubingen in Germany, show more becoming a historian of modern Scotland and North Sea oil; from Oxford, Matthew edited the Gladstone Diaries, wrote an award-winning life of the Victorian statesman, and became Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography in 1992. Colin Matthew died in 1999. show less