The Victorians: Britain through the paintings of the age

Published to coincide with the BBC series presented by Jeremy Paxman himself, this is a unique exploration of Victorian society through the paintings of the era.

Jeremy Paxman offers his unique take on the most important and influential period of Britain’s past. Using the paintings of the era as his starting point, Paxman explores themes of family, urban life, industry, empire and imagination, to uncover truths (and explode some myths) about Victorian Britain.

To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, immensely popular visual narratives that attracted crowds by the hundreds of thousands. The Victorians shows how artists like Butler, William Powell Frith, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Luke Fildes, and Ford Madox Brown, were chronicling a world changing before their eyes, and his overview ranges across the whole of Victorian life and culture: from high gothic architecture to the birth of the football league, from the novels of Dickens to the technological marvels of Brunel.