The Victorians by AN Wilson

Victorian values still count. Piers Brendon admires a sweeping portrait of the contradictory and self-critical age of doubt and drains, progress and poverty

Towards the end of this big, bold book, A N Wilson lets us into a secret: he would like to have been a Victorian country parson. Born around 1830 and blessed with good teeth (since modern dentistry is one of the few clear benefits bestowed on humanity by the 20th century), he would have avoided the brutalities of public school by being "delicate", learnt Greek from Benjamin Jowett at Balliol and, on marriage, obtained preferment to a comfortable College living. There he would dwell for 40 years, siring many children, ministering to the villagers temporally as well as spiritually, and reading the Prayer Book in his medieval church.

A Broad Churchman, one infers, he would be about as close to agnosticism as a Christian can get. So he does not mention the traumas of lost belief. The "dissolution of Jesus into mythologic vapour" would not be to him, as to Mark Rutherford, worse than the death of his dearest friend. Nor would he be appalled by the sense that, as the Rev Frederick Robertson put it, the universe was "a dead expanse, black with the void from which God himself had disappeared".

Instead, according to his imaginary account, Wilson would feel himself to be part of the central drama of the age. He would reconcile himself to the ebbing of the sea of faith, whether it was caused by Darwinism, capitalism or imperialism, or by railways or by "a nebulous Zeitgeist".

As this epiphany suggests, Wilson's ambitious history of the Victorians concentrates most heavily on their religious, intellectual and literary life. He describes the book as a "portrait of an age" but it is far more detailed (if less brilliant and authoritative) than G M Young's work of that title. And it skilfully depicts the great beasts in the cultural jungle – Wordsworth, Dickens, Carlyle, Newman, Darwin, Ruskin, Mill, Marx, Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Hardy, Kipling.

The mere recital of these names indicates the mind-boggling variety of ideas fermenting away during Victoria's reign. And it gives Wilson an opportunity to illustrate his theme: that her subjects possessed, par excellence, "the capacity for constructive self-criticism". In other words, their age was one of contradictions so thunderous that they still reverberate today.

It was an age of reform, of the march of mind, of progress. At Gad's Hill, Dickens had some false book-backs made for his library. Their titles were: "The Wisdom of our Ancestors – I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease." Yet it was also an age that dreamt of feudal order and conjured up revivals: neo-Gothic, Pre-Raphaelite, Young England. Wilson describes the contortions of the Tractarians as a kind of cerebral "Eglinton Tournament in which young men of the railway age tried to adopt the mentality of medieval monks".

It was an age of peace and aggressive imperialism, of laissez-faire and state intervention. Gross prosperity was shamed by grinding poverty; when the Earl of Yarborough died in 1875 his stock of cigars sold for enough to pay labourers on his estate for 18 years. Aestheticism vied with philistinism; Carlyle complained that England's only Mozart was Sir Henry Bishop, who composed "Home, Sweet Home".

Mrs Grundy reigned and, though Wilson denies that chair legs were ever draped, Lord Shaftesbury equipped nude statues at the Great Exhibition with fig leaves. Dean Farrar warned schoolboy onanists that they faced "shame, ruin... and an early grave". But there were 30,000 prostitutes in London. As the muck-raking journalist W T Stead revealed, 11-year-old virgins could be bought for £5.

Eminent Victorian women succeeded: Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, Beatrice Webb. But in Wilson's view, the greatest difference between their world and ours was the absolute dominance of men. This was a social as much as a legal matter: feminism was deemed unladylike. Even that doughty champion of women's rights, Caroline Norton, could believe "in the natural superiority of man, as I do in the existence of God".

Wilson is admirable on all this and much more. Although he disclaims the title of "academic historian", he is better informed than most and writes as well as any. He can be funny: Keir Hardie told the truth "even in so unlikely a setting as the House of Commons". He can be brusque: after Prince Albert's death, "there was no longer an intelligent member of the royal family".

He has an excellent eye for detail: Peel was the last Prime Minister of whom there is no photograph, whereas the first major political event to be photographed was the Chartist convention of 1848, probably by a police spy. He has a fund of memorable anecdotes: when his son took to building ritualist churches, the Vicar of Brighton preached a sermon on the text, "Lord have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic."

The book is also illuminating when it makes comparisons with modern Britain. It relates how two eight-year-olds murdered an infant in 1861, a case with ghastly resemblances to that of Jamie Bulger, and shows how the Victorians, although horrified, responded without hysteria. It demonstrates too that, despite the extension of the franchise after 1832, we still lack real enthusiasm for democracy. The head of state is hereditary, judges are appointed and, Wilson might have added, we lack a First Amendment to ensure the electorate is informed.

Naturally, there are cavils. Wilson slips up once or twice: Harold Harmsworth never owned The Times, and Winston Churchill did not spend "the greater part of his grown-up life in political exile". Some of Wilson's judgements are suspect: he suggests that Albert, had he lived, might have helped to avert the Great War. Others are perverse: he favours the ambitious Manning over the sibylline Newman (whose Apologia pro vita sua, supposedly "dashed off", is the finest autobiography in the language).

He can't include everything. Lytton Strachey was right: the history of the Victorian age will never be written because we know too much about it. But Wilson's picture, a view from a vicarage window, is a noble effort.

Piers Brendon is author of 'The Dark Valley' (Pimlico)