Gertrude Himmelfarb, a giant of 20th-century American letters, died Monday; she was 97. Reviewing her 1968 masterpiece, “Victorian Minds,” in Commentary, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote: “Doubtless, God could create a better interpreter of the English 19th century, but doubtless, God hasn’t.” Amen.
Her specialty was the Victorian period and what came to be known as “Victorian values”: “work, thrift, prudence, temperance, above all self-reliance and personal responsibility,” as she summed them up in a 1989 essay.
Read Full Article »