Today's Britons are an integral part of this onward and upward process, and in order to see why the triumphs of our real Victorian history have lessons for us now, we must understand what happened then.
There was one major difference, among millions of individual tiny differences, between Victorian Britain and Russia (or China). The British had several sources of social heterogeneity, dissidence, of exposure to the public eye of things being done or understood in different ways. From the Baptist chapel to the Quaker meeting house, from the Catholic cathedral with its sweet music and incomprehensible prayers to the Jewish synagogues with their strangely cloaked and hatted congregants who turned into your lawyer or your accountant during the week, religion was obviously diverse. In Poland and Russia, there were pogroms (particularly during the late nineteenth century); in England, there were only taxes. Even in English prisons, very different religious practices were respected, perhaps as much in the breach as in the practice, but the theory was well known and encouraged - if not enforced - by the law. This freedom of thought, word and deed lasted. After the Second World War, after the defeat of Nazism at immense cost, with London still in ruins and food rationed, Sir Oswald Mosley was an avowed fascist whose Blackshirts came down to the East End of London to promote their racist views. Jack was involved in street fights with them about once a month. Even then, he was pleased that their horrible speeches were permitted by the law. In the USA or Russia, Mosley would either have been in jail or elected president. There was a context of heterogeneity, of difference being more than accepted, being valued with a smile. And this was part of an unbroken tradition, going back to Victorian times.
The big difference that made Victorian Britain successful, itself fostered recursively by all the success stories within it - and by the disparate nature of these successes, such as Quakers, railways, big beautiful bridges, fewer starving children, control of some diseases - was in the ambience, the context, which promoted difference. It has been fashionable for a particularly naive kind of historian of science to point to the social context of scientific theories, and to pretend that science is therefore entirely socially driven. It is usually claimed, by the same token, that this provenance denies science its authority, so its truths merely follow social convention.
Victorian evolutionists provide a precise refutation of that view.
Wallace, for example, was born to poor parents, was apprenticed to a watchmaker for a while (obviously one of our wizards had been instructed to achieve this), then became a successful - though indigent - land agent, then a more successful animal and plant collector. He never made enough money to join the upper middle class, even after his star had risen alongside Darwin's.
Darwin was a junior aristocrat, his parents were well off, and it would have been entirely proper for him to have become a curate - and, indeed to have written Theology of Species. Other proevolutionists, as various as Owen (mistaken by Darwin for an anti-evolutionist because of his careful analysis of the anatomical implications of the Darwin/Wallace natural-selection idea), Huxley, Spencer, Kingsley, were all from different strata of society. We have seen that the first printing of Origin of Species was inadequate for the market, and all copies were sold by the second morning after publication. Would that have happened in nineteenth-century India? In Russia under the czars, or after the revolution? In the United States ... possibly. And in the German part of Prussia. Dickens's stories, critical as they were of the existing order, were anxiously awaited by all strata of society in England - and by many in the eastern United States.
It would not have been quite so strange if this heterogeneous society involved different groups that picked up on different ideas, according to their various philosophies and theologies. However, what really happened, both to Dickens and to Darwin and later to Wells, was a very general appreciation of their radical ideas, very widely, across all of those diverse groups. The same alternative views were welcomed by many different strata of society. More so, perhaps, than in any other society since, heterodoxy was almost the rule. Working men's clubs were hotbeds of rational argument, thanks to the establishment of evening classes by the Workers' Educational Association. Education for the common man was promoted by the new technical colleges and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
To some extent, the same went for all the embryo universities which, in Victorian times, had been seeded by philanthropic discussion groups in the big cities. These establishments, dark red-brick buildings found in the centres of all English industrial cities, were very different organisations from the ancient universities. The other half of the building, or the building opposite on the same street, was often the public library, an organisation not to be found in Russia or China at that time. These organisations provided a way up from manual labour to artisan, and there were a thousand such establishments all over Victoriana.
The real universities, of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrew's, were promoting orthodoxy via classics and the literary and governmental arts. The sciences were slowly coming in, mainly as theoretical physics and astrophysics, which needed only brains and blackboards, like mathematics. Practical sciences like geology and palaeontology, chemistry, and zoology went on in dark and dirty laboratories with tall glass and dark wood partitions; botany was backed up by aromatic herbaria. Such work had a very low status compared to mathematics and philosophy - it had associations with manual labour and dirt. However, archaeology, because of its continuing association with the classical world and its artefacts, had quite high status.
The burgeoning middle class didn't, by and large, aspire to these arcane practices. They wanted technical and scientific information, not to potter about with theories, however important and romantic. They didn't want classical anything, certainly not the classics. The universities proper were still requiring a classical education of all aspiring students, and even in the 1970s they continued to require competence in a foreign language from science entrants (as evidence, presumably, of some culture - they never required science or mathematics from arts or classics entrants). The workmen and the artisans' guilds cooperated to produce the apprenticeship system, and this was in many ways the model for their own educational organisations.
These, notably the WEA, provided exactly what was wanted, guided and monitored by the artisans' guilds and by the elected council representatives who helped oversee their relations with local industry, especially apprenticeship schemes. `City and Guilds' examinations, granting certificates and diplomas, were the educational currency of these self-organised educational systems, and they continued until the 1960s. They were the labels that qualified erstwhile labourers as artisans, worthy of respect by their peers.
This pulling yourself up by your bootstraps into respectable citizenship contrasts with the attitude to elected local councilmen by the universities that these organisations matured into. Like the ancient universities, new ones like Birmingham and Manchester rewarded local elected dignitaries, mayors, and councillors with honorary degrees. These empty titles, contrasting both with the earned certificates of the artisans and with the honorary degrees given to eminent scholars in recognition and respect, ensured a political allegiance - and devalued academia in general. Unfortunately, the profusion of such young universities in late twentieth-century England has meant that non-technical, even non-scientific subjects have again become fashionable, to the exclusion of that artisan education which was so healthy in late Victorian times. The devaluation of academic degrees of all kinds has continued apace, but at the same time the alternative and more worthy routes to self-advancement have atrophied.