In the beginning1994
the advent of the modern age, Europe in the 1840's
by Jerome Blum
"The most amazing epoch the world has yet seen": So Jerome Blum characterizes the 1840s, the decade when the modern era began. It was the fruit of the creative endeavors of a unique generation of geniuses then reaching maturity. In 1840, Dickens was twenty-eight, Marx twenty-two, Engels twenty, Bismarck twenty-five, Turgenev twenty-two, Dostoyevsky nineteen, Darwin thirty-one, Helmholtz nineteen, Thackeray twenty-nine, Courbet twenty-one, and Cavour thirty.
Filled with youthful self-confidence, this generation, writes Blum, sought change in every sphere of life.
"Revolution" occurred throughout society - in communications and transportation via the electric telegraph, railway networks, ocean steamships, photography, global mail; in social relations with the dawning of a social...