SOURCE: Davies, Christie. “What Made Them Moral?” National Review 47, no. 6 (3 April 1995): 63-4.

In the following review, Davies praises Himmelfarb's The De-Moralization of Society as a sensible, insightful, and erudite book.

[In The De-Moralization of Society] Gertrude Himmelfarb has given us an excellent, detailed, and insightful account of the creation, maintenance, and (in our time) decline of the Victorian virtues of work, thrift, self-reliance, self-respect, neighborliness, and patriotism. These virtues defined the character and ethos of the Victorian age in Britain and, with certain variants, in America and were upheld or at least aspired to by members of all social classes. Indeed, one of Professor Himmelfarb's key points is that these virtues were indigenous not only to the middle classes but also to large sections of those at the very bottom of the social order, who realized that the mundane virtues of respectability—such as sobriety, prudence, and frugality...