We do what they did, but they did it at a greater concentration. While these days we tend to alternate between retro moods and progressive moods - or, if you like, traditionalism and modernism - the Victorians mixed it all up. They did it all, all the time. And while we might think we are a bloodless, vacillating lot compared with the thrusting Victorians, in fact they too were assailed by doubts - about the effects of industrialisation, about politics, religion, royalty, the threatening world outside.

It was a remarkably Janus-faced period, in which astonishing technological advances were made, but which simultaneously retreated into mock medievalism in art, crafts and architecture. A period when extreme sentimentality about the joys of rural life was matched by the vast expansion of industrial cities and the depopulation of the countryside. When radical politics was being fomented in the reading room of the British Museum, but - although a woman was head of state for 64 years during all the reforms- her sex did not enjoy the vote. A Queen, moreover, who effectively went AWOL for years and years, but who successfully reinvented the image of the monarchy as a middle-class family rather than an ad-hoc collection of dissolute aristocrats. And the whole colourful, chaotic juggernaut of Victorian life was distasteful to the new breed of modernists. One thing no true Victorian would ever have said is: Less is more.