In a meeting last week a colleague mentioned, in passing, a report he’d read that referred to an institution’s “Victorian” approach. Was that, another colleague asked, intended as a compliment? The laughter was spontaneous, loud and long.

And it set me thinking. Is there any other age that is so abused, any other period of our past that generates such automatic, pejorative connotations? Call something Elizabethan or Jacobean and you simply date it, no approbation or condemnation is implied. Call something Augustan or Baroque and some will consider it a compliment, others a warning, but it’s explicitly a matter of personal taste. Regency implies a certain loucheness as, in its own, more gentle way, does Edwardian, but there’s something appealing about both. Invite someone on a Regency weekend and you would expect some twirling of moustaches, the odd heaving bosom and a general air of foppery.

Dangle a visit to an Edwardian resort in front of a friend and they would expect bandstands, cream teas and gentle bathing. Perhaps not ideal if you’re, say, planning a stag night for Wayne Rooney or scouting out a launch venue for Basement Jaxx’s new album but still, hardly what you’d call a penal colony.

But suggest to someone they might like to spend some time in a Victorian institution, or recommend a friend on the basis of their Victorian manners, or even, Heaven forfend, suggest there’s something worth learning from Victorian values, and you might as well ask if they’d like their sushi well done. It’s such a cosmic betrayal of contemporary mores as to make you an instant laughing stock.

Which is why it falls to this column to speak up for the Victorians. I don’t think there has been a better time in our history. Better leaders than Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury? Braver thinkers than Mill, Ruskin, Faraday and the mighty Darwin? And, crucially, when was English literature ever more richly endowed with talent? From Hardy to Dickens, George Eliot to Mrs Gaskell, Tennyson to Browning, Arnold to Wilde, English poetry and prose was never so well served.

So why, then, the stigma? Well, in one sense some of these writers were, literally, the authors of their own misfortune. The narrative, and descriptive, genius of Dickens means that our image of Victoria’s reign has been framed by his writing. He makes us think of that reign as Hard Times. The reforming gusto he brought to exposing the miseries of debtors’ prisons and blacking factories, workhouses and schoolhouses, Chancery and the Circomlocution Office, means that our sense of his time is forever shaped by the scandals he brought so brilliantly to light. Add to that the cultural pessimism of Arnold, or the gloomy, almost pagan Greek, view that humankind was doomed to tragedy, held by Hardy, and you come away from Victorian literature with a sense of bleakness. Magnificent bleakness, but bleakness nonetheless.

There are, however, exceptions. And none, I believe, more powerful than Eliot. Which is why it is so cheering that there are two, quite wonderful studies of her just published. A straightforward page-turner of a biography by Brenda Maddox and a quite gripping study of her last, and most intriguing, novel, Daniel Deronda, by the great Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Both Maddox and Himmelfarb recognise that Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans as she was born, stands comparison with the greats of Russian literature. She had formidable powers of imaginative sympathy, which allowed her to fully inhabit characters as various as ageing Jewish visionaries, impulsive and headstrong young women of fashion and a variety of compromised idealists. And she combined the very best of high realism in fiction with a deep and generous moral sense that suffuses everything she wrote with wisdom. Her gospel, if you can distil such a simple thing from so much that was brilliant, is contained in the final words of Middlemarch: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

As Victorian values go, I find it unimprovable. . .

Raw anger

Which is more than can be said for the burger I had on Thursday. Dining with some friends in an otherwise wonderful wee town I shan’t shame by naming, I ordered the house special. Rare.

As someone who loves their meat and prefers it to be as unmucked about with as possible (how would you like your steak? Just take off its horns and wipe its bottom. . .) I was looking forward to a lightly singed pattie of beefy goodness.

Until the waitress returned, all apologies, and explained that we couldn’t have rare burgers for “health and safety” reasons. I wondered if I’d walked into a tabloid editorial by mistake. But no, it was true, my fellow diners explained. They’d been in several chains where the same rule applied.

My burger, when it arrived, was not half-bad. But that’s not the point. I wanted it not half-cooked. I couldn’t ask the waitress, a lovely, blameless lady. But who passed the law which prevents me eating what comes naturally?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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