Were the Victorians really happier than we are?

an article by Hannah Rose Woods published in the New Statesman

And whose happiness are we talking about, exactly?

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As the front page of yesterday’s [15 October 2019] Times would have it, Britons have never been happier than when the British Empire was at its peak and Queen Victoria was on the throne. Citing research published in the science journal Nature, which tracked the emotional tone of books and newspapers over the past 200 years, the paper proclaimed that, “Britons really were more cheerful in the good old days.”

According to the researchers’ “index of national happiness,” Britain’s happiest decade was apparently the 1880s. That may come as a surprise to historians, who are more used to thinking of the late Victorian period as an age of anxiety pervaded by a growing awareness of urban poverty, social unrest, and fears of national decline in the face of growing international competition.

Please continue reading until you get to the final paragraph.

As the historian Robert Saunders has recently argued, this is nostalgia for a highly selective version of history, written by “second-hand dealers in the past” who “rummage through the scrapyard of history, pulling out the most useful parts and welding them together into a vehicle for their ambitions”. It is a useable vision of Britain’s past – one that aims to rebuild a sense of national confidence through Victorian “pluck” and endurance, and to teach us that, like the Victorians, we shouldn’t let social inequality complicate the business of national happiness.

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