We live in a world the Victorians created. Their two great inventions go hand-in-hand: industrial capitalism and imperialism. A.N. Wilson illuminates these two great facts, not in ideological terms but in personal terms, through the people who built them. In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age, he describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being.

The capitalist world came about because of actual businessmen, actual journalists, and actual politicians. It was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw — here they are. Here are the lofty and famous — Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Gladstone and Disraeli. And here too are the poor and the obscure — doctors ministering to cholera victims in the big cities, young women working as models for the famous painters, the man who got the British hooked on cigarettes, the butchers and victims of conflict in Ireland, India and Africa.