An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain

The Age of Equipoise by W.L. Burn became a central text in the canon of interpretations of the Victorian period. The book subsequently fell out favour but recent claims to establish a new interpretative standard have prompted reviewers to cast back to Burn’s work as the orthodox standard against which such claims should be judged. The essays in this volume all engage, to varying degrees, with the notion of equipoise and examine how it can help illuminate the mid-Victorian period in ways which alternative formulations cannot. The essays aim to demonstrate the intricacy and turbulence of the forces of cohesion in Victorian society, along with the success of that culture in achieving a working, if shifting, modus vivendi. Moreover, they intend to substantiate the argument that, whatever the limitations of Burn’s work, equipoise deserves rehabilitation as a powerful conceptual framework for making sense of mid-Victorian Britain.