SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Victorian Era Offers Model, Not Solution for Today.” Christian Science Monitor 87, no. 55 (14 February 1995): 13.

In the following review, Rubin asserts that Himmelfarb's The De-Moralization of Society lacks a coherent unifying thesis.

Few would deny that most of us living today could do a lot worse than look to the once-ridiculed Victorians for role models. Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian who has written lucidly and provocatively about 19th-century England over the past five decades, is too sensible to propose a wholesale return to a bygone age. But she strongly believes we could learn a lot from taking a fresh look at formerly mocked Victorian virtues.

Her latest book, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, contains the kind of perceptive insights about 19th-century manners and mores we have come to expect from her, along with somewhat nebulous, inadequately thought-out suggestions about restoring a sense...