As the century ends, historians can be just as easily tempted to use the word "new" as politicians. This impressive study of mid-Victorian Britain by a professor of history at Hull University is the latest volume in a New Oxford History of England , and it takes account of most of the conclusions of recent historical research without necessarily accepting them all.

Theodore Hoppen has already contributed to this historiography in his original and penetrating studies of Ireland, which figures prominently in the 19th-century British story that he now covers more generally, including within it the stories of Scotland - very well treated - and Wales. He demonstrates that he is familiar with the work of scholars in a wide variety of fields, including economic, political and religious history. Sometimes he feels that as a historian he is in the middle of a jungle. At other times he moves down tempting byways, examining tracks and footprints. In both situations he memorably suggests that "the inhabitants of the past have laid wonderfully beguiling traps for those bent on making simple sense of complex affairs".

This is a reasonable as well as a memorable sentiment, provided that it is recognised also that historians provide traps of their own, particularly by describing the past in terms that contemporaries would never have recognised. Another memorable and even more reasonable Hoppen statement is that "the characteristics of any past age are revealed not simply by political and social developments but by the manner in which contemporaries tried to explain their situation in time and place and by the language and concepts in which such explanations are formulated and discussed".

It is notable that Hoppen is probably the first serious historian of the period to give attention to G. M. Young's Portrait of an Age , which rested on this proposition. However, he does not mention it in his list of "general works", although his accompanying chronology is devised along the lines that Young followed, albeit somewhat differently. Young was more interested in direct encounters with Victorian evidence than in sifting new books and articles, although over time he was responsible for generating more books and articles reinterpreting the Victorians than any other writer. He could irritate, but more often he would stimulate, and his sensitive portrait, very different from any old - or new - Oxford History , was a study in light and shade. I hope that his Portrait will never be relegated to the cellar. Nor, for different reasons, should E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class suffer that fate. It is another book left out of Hoppen's basic list.

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"We now know much more about many things and think about what we know in different ways," J. M. Roberts, the general editor of the new series and a distinguished contributor to world history, writes in a preface. The author of each volume has been asked "to bring forward what he or she sees as the most important topics explaining the history under study, taking account of the present state of historical knowledge, drawing attention to areas of dispute and to matters on which final judgement is at present difficult (or, perhaps, impossible)".

It is within this framework that Hoppen has diligently discharged his responsibilities, and in a very brief introduction to a very long volume he explains how he set about his task. It is a modest explanation rather than a bold new manifesto, concerned more with the state of knowledge and how best to arrange it than with knowledge itself. That must be grounded in the Victorian evidence, primary and secondary, and in subsequent interpretations of it.

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Quite deliberately, Hoppen disposes of the notion of an "over-arching theme", fearing "distortions both subtle and unsubtle". Nonetheless, in dividing The Mid-Victorian Generation into four "parts" - society and the state; the fabric of politics; money and mentalities; and England and beyond - he identifies "themes" or "contexts" - "established industrialism", "multiple national identities" and "interlocking spheres". He also uses architectural images as he relates "parts" to "themes". The first three chapters in part one "constitute a kind of blueprint of the social architecture of the mid-Victorian United Kingdom": the structure is well built. Part two focuses on political events, as do the last chapters in part four: the chronology is clear. The five chapters of part three deal with "fundamental economic, behavioural and intellectual aspects of mid-Victorian life": there is some repetition here, and there are gaps. It is here that we find a section with the subtitle "The business of culture", which is more concerned with business than with culture. In this context, new ideas in 20th-century cultural studies, often helpful in directing attention to past cultures, are not used. Yet his excellent section on "The evolutionary moment" really does deal with culture. I would like to have seen it broadened out.

Hoppen discards the familiar Victorian scaffolding of early, middle and late, with 1851 and 1867 (or 1870) as break points - my favourite way of dividing it - although he still uses "mid-Victorian" in his title. He often strays into territory beyond 1886 and he is less coherent for the period before 1846. The 1840s are too sharply divided, and we lose 1851 as a vantage point and the 1870s as a watershed. Disposing of an over-arching theme has absolved Hoppen from the task of critically assessing the over-arching themes which Victorians - and an earlier generation of historians - rightly or wrongly chose, such as the queen's reign itself.

He (and we) can never escape the pressures of the present. Hoppen's volume ends with a topical reflection. "Ireland continues to hang heavily over British politics, with British politicians too little and Irish politicians perhaps too much aware of the histories and precedents crowding around the constitutional and other problems with which - despite Gladstone's efforts - they are still condemned to deal."

Lord Briggs was formerly provost, Worcester College Oxford.

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