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|title=Victoria's Madmen: Revolution and Alienation

|author=Clive Bloom

|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan

|date=August 2013

|website=http://www.clivebloom.com/

|summary=The Victorian era, and its immediate aftermath, as seen through the lives of assassins, occultists, anarchists, revolutionaries and other free spirits

}}

Despite the revisionist work of a few writers and historians, our prevailing image of the Victorian age has generally been one of staid conformity, superiority and stuffiness, during which only a few dissenters put their heads above the parapet. Clive Bloom sums it up rather succinctly on the first page as a ‘monolith of steam and class conflict, antimacassars and aspidistras’. A page later, he describes the nineteenth century – most of which was covered by the Victorian era – as one divided by three groups, namely those who represented the old Georgian decadence, the young Turks eager for reform, and finally a group who felt an allegiance to the world of their forebears but were forced to exist in a world of confirming moralism and priggishness. The young Turks, he concludes, ultimately won.