The sons and daughters of the Victorian intelligentsia often claimed to have rejected their parents' political liberalism and domestic puritanism. But how much of this legacy did they really reject?

Written by a team of eminent historians, these biographical essays explore how ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as "civilization," domesticity," "conscience" and "improvement" to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M.

Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world.