Cool Map

And then Hackett Fischer offers us this:

In the Victorian era, as in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, creative thinkers in many fields drew their conceptual models from their historical condition. Similar textures of thought appeared in the biology of Darwin (1809-82), the geology of Charles Lyell (1797-1875), the historiography of Leopold von Ranke (I795-1886), the economics of Karl Marx (1818-83), the politics of William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) and the statecraft of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65).

However different their ideologies may have been, these Victorians all thought of the world in dynamic terms as a process rather than a static state. All of them understood that world-process as a sequence of conflicts which were progressive, coherent, self-regulating and self-sustaining. The Darwinian principle of natural selection, the Rankean idea of historicism, the Marxian model of dialectical materialism, the Lyellian concept of geologic stratiology, the Lincolnian creed of liberal conservatism and the Gladstonian ideology of conservative liberalism shared those qualities in common.

These large ideas resembled the Victorian equilibrium itself, which was a dynamic, progressive, self-balancing and self-sustaining structure of countervailing forces. Most of these thinkers (with a few exceptions such as Lincoln) also shared a spirit that H. G. Wells called “optimistic fatalism.” This, too, was an expression of the Victorian equilbrium, and an instrument by which it was maintained.