Gertrude Himmelfarb, a giant of 20th-century American letters, died Monday; she was 97. Reviewing her 1968 masterpiece, “Victorian Minds,” in Commentary, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote: “Doubtless, God could create a better interpreter of the English 19th century, but doubtless, God hasn’t.” Amen.
Her specialty was the Victorian period and what came to be known as “Victorian values”: “work, thrift, prudence, temperance, above all self-reliance and personal responsibility,” as she summed them up in a 1989 essay.
Like all great historians, she studied the past to guide the present and the future. To wit, Himmelfarb sought to shield the idea that there is such a thing as moral truth, true for all ages and classes — against the fashionable Marxist notion that moral truth is how the powerful dupe the weak.
Born in Brooklyn in 1922, she received her bachelor’s from Brooklyn College and went on to graduate study at the University of Chicago, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. At age 20, she married Irving Kristol, one of the founding neoconservatives, the group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who migrated from left to right during the Cold War.
They remained husband and wife, and true intellectual partners, through the ideological turbulence of the postwar period and the vagaries and infighting of the smoke-filled, disputatious world of the New York intellectuals. Kristol died in 2009 (Himmelfarb was also known familiarly as Bea Kristol).
For Himmelfarb the academic, history had vital lessons that could be grasped by studying the lives and minds of the men and women who made it. Hers was the kind of history-writing that most “sophisticated” types believed should have been left buried along with her Victorian heroes. It is our good fortune that she refused to go along.
She admired and defended the Victorian era’s social reformers and their efforts to “moralize” the problems created by rapid industrialization and the rise of capitalism: drinking, wife-beating, sexual degeneracy and so on. For the Marxist historians, the moral aspect of the Victorian reform was just a way of strengthening capitalist “social control.”
Himmelfarb disagreed, and she exposed the condescension toward working men and women hidden in such claims.
“The reformers may have been unrealistic in their actions, intentions and expectations,” she wrote. “But are they to be condemned for ‘imposing’ (if that is the right word) upon the poor the values they imposed on their own families? Were they patronizing or condescending when they assumed that the poor had the ability and the will to act upon those values?”
What’s worse: To set one standard for all, even if it’s upheld only in the breach, as was often the case with the hypocritically naughty Victorians? Or to shatter standards altogether in the name of “liberating” the poor and working classes from “bourgeois” moralizing?
Reading Himmelfarb’s histories, one wishes that today’s liberals were more like the Victorians. In our own age, elite liberals join hand-in-hand with libertarian “conservatives” to promote family-destroying moral disruption — even as they themselves continue to marry, attend church and keep their kids away from hypnotizing digital screens.
Yet Himmelfarb wasn’t uncritical of the Victorians. In an incisive 1985 essay, she wondered why they had failed to transmit their virtues to the next generation. The answer was that “late Victorian morality” for the most part didn’t rely on the “sanctions and consolations of religion” and was therefore “too impoverished, too far removed from its original inspiration” — that is, Christianity.
Victorian “respectability,” without a metaphysical and spiritual core, couldn’t last.
Himmelfarb’s lessons remain pertinent to our own time, as a new generation of Americans sets out to address what are real social problems — inequality, alienation, job insecurity and the rest — but imagines that traditional morality is the enemy, rather than the friend, of social progress.
May her memory be for a blessing.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari