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282 The nineteenth century
cover such topics as utilitarianism, liberty, logic, and political economy.
They reflect the intellectual concerns of the day, rather than make a
wholly original contribution to the history of thought.
In the nineteenth century, the novels of Sir Walter Scott gave a totally
fresh view of the mixed history which united the once-divided Scotland,
and later the once-divided United Kingdom. The leading non-fictional
historian of the age was Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose Essays
Critical and Historical (1834) reached a wide audience. Compared to
Edward Gibbon (see page 164), however, Macaulay is less balanced,
more prejudiced and dogmatic. His History of England, published in
four volumes between 1849 and 1855, can now be seen to reflect Victorian
attitudes and complacency, although his reconstructions of historical
events, under Scott’s influence, are still effective.
Probably the most famous and influential work of its kind, written
in England, was Das Kapital by Karl Marx, published in 1867. Das
Kapital, in effect a theory of political economy, is a negative critique
of the capitalist system which concentrates wealth in the hands of
fewer and fewer people, at the expense of the labouring class. Marx,
with Friedrich Engels, had made a close study of Britain’s industrial
system and its effects. Engels’s study The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1845) praises Carlyle’s awareness of workers’
conditions, and anticipates the kind of situation which Elizabeth Gaskell
was to describe, three years later, in Mary Barton.
Marx has been blamed for many things which Das Kapital does not
suggest. But the abolition of private property, the advocacy of class war,
and the slogan ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to
his needs’ are vital to his doctrines, and brought to the age a new awareness
of social class, means of production, and working-class exploitation. His
ideas were to become more important as the century progressed.
Marxism is a social and materialist philosophy contrasting with more
religious and spiritual views of the world. After the Catholic Emancipation
Act of 1829, there was a movement towards the Catholic church on the
part of some members of the Anglican faith. The Oxford Movement, as it
was known, was a small but significant eddy in the tide of Victorian faith.
The theme, however, remains of interest right up to the present, in the
novels of Barbara Pym and some of the early novels of A.N. Wilson; but