SOURCE: Berger, Peter L. “The 19th Century and After.” Commentary 99, no. 5 (May 1995): 66, 68-9.

In the following review of The De-Moralization of Society, Berger applauds Himmelfarb's assessment of a moral crisis in today's society, and commends her advocacy of a return to Victorian moral virtues.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is probably the most distinguished American historian working on 19th-century England. In recent years she has also written as a critic of miscellaneous social and cultural developments in today's Western world. The present volume [The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values] continues both activities. It will interest those who like to read about the last century, and those who worry about the current one.

Himmelfarb returns here to a subject she has dealt with extensively in earlier works: the moral fabric of Victorian society and the undeservedly bad press it has received from later commentators. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians...