This chapter explores Victorian culture using the concepts of tradition and dilemma to highlight both continuities and discontinuities. Continuities arose from the persistence of traditions from the late eighteenth century right through the late nineteenth century. Discontinuities arose as people responded to dilemmas in ways that transformed these traditions. More specifically, the dominant traditions in Victorian Britain were liberalism and evangelicalism, both of which had constitutive places in a wide range of domestic, social, political, and imperial practices. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, these two traditions confronted dilemmas such as the collapse of classical economics and the crisis of faith. People responded to these dilemmas in ways that decisively changed social practices, altering the manner of religious worship, inspiring a new trade unionism, and fragmenting the Liberal Party. The British socialist movement developed in the context of these changes, sometimes benefiting from them, sometimes contributing to them, and at other times struggling to respond to them.
