Jacobs, Alan. "Family Virtues." The American Scholar 64, no. 4. 1995.

Abstract:

Some years ago the popular historian Barbara Tuchman published A Distant Mirror, a book that claims that in the struggles of the fourteenth century we can discern the out- lines of our own time’s conflicts. In The De- Moralization of Society a much finer historian produces a highly provocative exercise in the same genre. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Victorians, though much closer to us than the medievals not only in time but also in the particular social problems with which they were confronted, are of special interest because they responded to those problems so differently – and with so much more s

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