Why did Dorothea choose to marry the wimp, Ladislaw, rather than the goodly Dr Lydgate in Middle-march? Was it just sex? Who was the greater leader, Gladstone or Churchill? Was Dickens truly a radical and Disraeli truly a Con-servative? And why did sensible Mr Knightley marry that prig, Emma?

These may seem mere questions to put conversational zest into long summer dinner parties. But to find them tackled by an 85-year-old American historian of decidedly right-wing views is a surprise. Gertrude Himmelfarb has long championed Victorian morality as the solution to today’s ills. She is mother superior to the neoconservatives, queen bee to the moral majority and a reputed influence on Conservative and Republican social policy since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Gordon Brown is said to digest large slabs of Himmelfarb on his holidays. To all who cry woe on modern society, she cries, death to the liberals and long live Victorian values. I cannot imagine a message less likely to find sympathy in modern Britain. Yet Himmelfarb is so lively, well-read and compelling a writer that her new collection of essays, mostly on eminent British Victorians, is the answer to a controversialist’s dream. She delves into Austen, George Eliot and Dickens, into Burke, Disraeli, Bagehot and Mill, to investigate their moral integrity. The more liberal they seem the more desperately she examines them for conservative traces. Morality, religion, home and hearth lie at the root of western civilisation, she cries, and all else is backsliding. She is like Ruskin, cursing all traces of pagan classicism in the stones of ancient Venice.

Hence in Middlemarch, Himmelfarb praises Eliot’s Dorothea for lifting Ladislaw from the “moral stupidity” of youth to a “morally mature adult, responsible and dutiful”. The young couple duly turn their backs on the progressives of the city and join the many “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. Likewise, Austen’s Emma earns Knightley’s love not by some noble act but by learning “good manners”. Her moral redemption lies in her enforced observance of “the proprieties that humanise and civilise social relations in a society where class is an indubitable fact of life”. Even Dickens, surely the epitome of a liberal imagination, is eulogised for his respect for family values and the moral sanctity of women and for his assault on “mathematical” utilitarianism in Hard Times.

These writers may seem to us to be doing no more than holding a mirror to the moral conventions of their day, but to Himmelfarb everyone is grist to the mill. Often she is downright perverse. Why not choose Gladstone rather than the slippery Disraeli as a champion of traditional values? The latter’s reformism had none of Gladstone’s moral rigour any more than his imperialism had that of a Palmerston or a Milner.

As for Himmelfarb’s apotheosis of the ever-devious Churchill, this is now historical anachronism. True, Churchill’s political perception was sometimes right, but it was more often wrong and had little moral compass beyond his own eccentricities. As ideologues, both he and Disraeli might be termed Blairites, seizing the catch phrases of the moment for their political or literary convenience and changing sides when it suited them.

The search for Conservative virtue is more successful with Himmelfarb’s choice of philosophers, Burke, Bagehot, Mill and Oakeshott. But even here she goes over the top. Desperate to claim Mill as her own, she unearths “the other Mill” as if he were a covert neocon hiding in some recusant’s priest hole. She cites his early dismissal of the “social tyranny” of democracy, his defence of “rule by the best” and his assault on Utilitarianism. But these often confused writings were produced when Mill was under the youthful influence of the Romantics (at an age when Himmelfarb herself was a Trotsky-ite). They lack the mature reasoning of his masterpiece of liberal rationality, On Liberty.

But nitpicking with Himmelfarb is like telling Stalin that some of the tanks in Red Square look suspiciously cardboard. The stimulus for these essays is in the relentless skirmish with the prevailing liberal consensus. Every one is a testament to the thesis that whatever is (or was) is best. Thus when Himmelfarb declares with another hero, Oakeshott, that “the true conservative resists unnecessary changes and suffers necessary ones”, she gives no definition of necessary. Necessity is apparently something that comes out later in the historical wash. Liberals do their thing but they must wait for conservatives to pass judgment with hindsight.

The Victorian age was a titanic struggle between those who believed that reason, science and a liberal sensibility offered humankind the path to progress and those who believed the opposite. There is nothing Victorian in this dichotomy, which is alive and kicking today, which is why Himmelfarb remains a force on the political right and why Bushites and Thatch-erites alike are reading her. For all her philosophical naivety, the author’s vivid writing and generosity to her characters maintain a tremendous pace. As Queen Victoria said in praising Oliver Twist to an appalled Lord Melbourne, “but it is excessively interesting”. The Victorians were always interesting, not least in offering Himmelfarb such raw meat for controversy.

That is why I most liked the discussion of Walter Bagehot, the editor, philosopher and politician. His Britain displays the “two sides of the moon, the double nature of man, the dual aspect of reality”. He would have surely pointed out to Himmelfarb that her detested rationalism can sit happily with tradition and learning from the past. It can yield social policies that are both conservative and rational, such as workfare. To Bagehot, British history since Magna Carta has been that of political tradition grasping and adapting liberal values to better the condition of the people. It was never more so than in Himmelfarb’s beloved 19th century. But if I frequently hurled this book across the room in frustration, I quickly ran to pick it up again.

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Souvenir £12.99 pp272
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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