Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You

Modern Victorians (1x3)

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Postwar culture has not merely been driven by the same qualities and impulses that shaped Victorian Britain - it has also demonstrated many of the same anxieties and preoccupations of that period. In particular, the two main concerns of the Victorian age were the state of the nation, and what might be termed our civilising mission - the desire to export British values to the far corners of globe. In a sense, postwar culture has been a process of working through our changing position - coming to terms with our loss of place in the world, and facing up to the legacy of empire. In so doing, it has reflected a profoundly Victorian series of concerns. Where Dickens was troubled about the impact of industrialisation and work on poor urban communities, postwar artists, writers and film-makers like Irvine Welsh, Danny Boyle and Catherine Cookson have been preoccupied with the impact of deindustrialisation and lack of work on these communities. Likewise, the civilising mission of the Victorian age has become translated in the postwar years into science fiction and fantasy, where British values can be exported, not to far-flung corners of the globe, but to an empire of the imagination.