In the 1840s, Great Britain was wracked by poverty and uncertainty: there were attempts to assassinate the queen, and the ruling class lived in fear of revolution. By the 1880s, it was a confident nation, transformed not just by industrialization but by new attitudes to politics, education, women, and the working class. What happened? It was largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic group of people—politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers—and here Simon Heffer creates a landscape view of how they laid the foundations for a modern society.