British Cruisers of the Victorian Era Hardcover – Illustrated, November 15, 2012

As with all things, make sure you are buying what you want. The first 150 pages of the 400 page book covers the steam/sailing ships. While these are neat, I am not that interested in them. So once again, make sure you are buying what you are interested in. The book has excellent, very clear, detailed, close up photos of many of the ships. There are also excellent line drawings and coverage of each class. If you want to build a model of one of these ships, you will be pleased to use this book as a reference. However, as prior reviews noted, many of these photos were printed covering two pages and some is lost in the binding of the book. I find this unfortunate as the pictures are excellent and very detailed. But, on the other hand, it doesn't detract THAT much from the photos. For this reason, I give the book a 4 star rating.For those interested in this era, I recommend it. I think you will be pleased despite the photos.

"British Cruisers of the Victorian Era" has a lot going for it. The production values are superb; the hundreds of photographs from the National Maritime Museum are of superb quality, as are the dozens of detailed plan and profile drawings by A D Baker III. The pages are printed on high-quality glossy stock, and the binding is quite strong. The scope of the book is impressive, starting with the steam corvettes of the 1840s and ending with the big first-class cruisers of the early 1900s. And with Norman Friedman at the helm, rest assured it's an exhaustive treatment of the subject.When Friedman is in his element, this book is superb. The introduction is very well done, going into intricate detail on the political situation of post-Napoleonic Europe, the evolution of British fleet tactics in the early steam era, the design of steam engines and boilers, the types of guns used by these ships, and the designing of ships for trade protection and duty on overseas stations. Friedman dovetails these developments with the difficulty of selling these ships to a fickle English government, and the problems associated with procuring and maintaining enough ships to protect distant British possessions from whatever the Royal Navy's projected "future enemy" might be. Like his eight-volume series on American warship design, this book focuses mainly on the evolution of each new ship class, and the political and military forces behind them, rather than their Royal Navy service. Many of the photo captions are quite lengthy and serve as capsule summaries of the ship's life, but this book never attempts to be a serious operational analysis.So why only three stars? For a top-shelf military reference book written by one of the finest naval historians of our time, it's presented more like a coffee table book gathering dust at Barnes and Noble. Friedman has always been a serious academic writer, so Seaforth's recent attempts at "sexing up" his recent works strikes me as odd. Many of the photographs are spread across two pages, with important details like funnels and masts falling into the gutter, with smaller photographs frequently plopped incongruously atop larger ones. Ship specifications and important dates are included as appendixes (the only thing that's ever really bothered me about Friedman's books), resulting in an awful lot of back-and-forth cross referencing. Finally, this book is riddled with typos, sometimes several on the same page."British Cruisers of the Victorian Era" is a worthwhile book for fans of British warships, but it's a shame to see a potential masterpiece sunk by bad editing and formatting.

It's hard to think of anything that could be improved upon in this compendium of a massive subject. The introduction alone (covering not only technology but strategic thinking, including the various RN exercises) is terrific. The drawings are excellent, and cover almost all classes (but see below); the organization by material and strategic purpose is easy to understand and follow.If forced to find any faults at all, they might be absence of plans for the important (but unsuccessful) Mersey class, and of any early steam cruisers other than HMS Shah. I would have liked to see a paddler (HMS Terrible?) and certainly one of the wooden steam frigates. I would also have liked to see just a dotted line on the plan drawings indicating the waterline - giving a suggestion for hull profile in modeling without the labor and confusion of full hull lines.Highly, highly recommended.

When this book was first announced I figured the title was probably not to be taken literally. What would be covered, no doubt, were the British cruising vessels after the introduction of iron and steel hulls from about 1860 onwards. This was the approach taken by Parkes with his "British Battleships" and by Conway Maritime with "Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860-1905" so surely Friedman would follow suit. No, not at all! Friedman's coverage goes back even before the Victorian Era proper and includes virtually all steam driven cruising ships since the introduction of steam propulsion.Friedman starts with a long Introduction which explains in minute details the strategic, economic, technological, and political realities that shaped cruisers during this period. The first chapter proper cover the paddle and screw driven frigates and sloops which introduced steam power to the Royal Navy. The next chapter describes the first iron hulled cruisers followed by the early armored cruisers. Then we get to the real meat of the book which begins with the introduction of the steel hull. Four chapters follow in succession which deal roughly with second, third, first, and armored cruisers. The book finishes with a short chapter which explains the temporary cessation of cruiser construction under Fisher in favor of the battlecruiser. Throughout one gets interesting nuggets of information like Barnaby being the inventor of the protective deck and insights like White's armored cruisers being functional battlecruisers.The text is supported with numerous mostly well reproduced photographs with detailed captions. In addition there are numerous line drawings (almost always with plans and elevations) equally well captioned. The book has an extensive Bibliography, chapter notes, data tables, ship lists, and an index.Coverage almost always errs on the side of inclusiveness. Sloops and lesser vessels are omitted after the introduction of iron hulls as these no longer had the speed to be considered cruisers but in cases where particular designs were influential coverage is fairly complete, the Curlew and Landrail with their torpedo armament for example. Others are only mentioned as types beyond the scope of the book like the Condor and Cadmus class sloops.Complaints are few and are the same ones I usually have about Friedman books. The text is really dense and the book could have stood for being at least a hundred pages longer. Too much is pushed out to the chapter notes. The text, the notes, and the captions give the reader the impression he is reading multiple books simultaneously with all the flipping back and forth. The illustrations are often out of sequence with the text. The line drawings are fit to the width of the page instead of to the length. Most of the ships could really have used the larger size.Friedman's previous book (the chronological successor to the current book) indicated that the Dreadnought era battlecruisers would be included in the current book. This turned out not to be the case. Looking on the bright side I hope that this means Friedman is working on a pair of British capital ship books. If so they will be very welcome and I can only hope they are done in chronological order unlike the destroyer and cruiser books.Highly recommended.

For me, this is a wonderful book- one I have been 'waiting for' for many years. I have many of Norman Friedman's books and they are all excellent and well produced, though you have to accept his rather 'dry' style and a lack of critical appraisal of the ships performance in service. There is some of the latter here in the last chapter ('Fishers Revolution'), but it is not general elsewhere.Many books 'race over' the early Victorian period, but this one is quite comprehensive and 150 pages pass before we reach the William White Era and the key 'watershed' of the Naval Defence act of 1889.Mr Baker's line drawings are superb, though few of them illustrate the early ships. They include plan as well as profile views and are very detailed. Because these plans are all produced 'across the page' they are a bit small and have obviously been reduced from the originals- but space would have been an issue. Whilst I agree with another reviewer that armour layout would be nice to see, this would have required even more plans and since many cruisers only had deck and casement armour the presentation may not have been very informative.There are hundreds of photographs, many of which I have never seen before, which is excellent given that good photos taken before about 1885 can be very hard to find. I wonder if a greater page width, at expense of vertical depth, might not have been better, thus avoiding running some pictures across the binding, which is never really satisfactory. I do, however, applaud the large size of most of the photographs in the book.The text is very detailed, especially giving the political and technical background to the designs. For example Constructor William Whites' philosophy is well explained: for the Royal Navy, with its world- wide commitments, continuous sea speed and endurance mattered much more than 'headline' trial performance. Moreover before the arrival of Krupp armour White would not sacrifice vital deck protection for a very narrow belt or for an ineffective coating of thin plate. Later, the 'Cressy' class armoured cruisers were really as well protected as contemporary battlships and Mr Friedman considers them to be the true precursors of the battlecruiser. The author appreciates that when tested in battle during World War One all these ships had outdated technology, but although some features were misguided- such as lower deck casemates- there is every reason to suppose they would have performed as intended when new.There are interesting accounts of Armstrong and Vickers ships (including fine drawings of many of these), also comparison with important foreign designs, especially those of France and Russia. Perhaps unfortunately the small 'scout' cruisers of the Adventure, Forward, Pathfinder, Sentinel, Boadicea, Blonde and Active classes (1902- 12) are not included here- I now understand they are featured in Mr Friedmans second book on Destroyers instead (please see maddogporters entries in the 'comments' section below).I would have liked the technical tables presented alongside the ship descriptions rather than all gathered at the end of the book, but everyone will have their own ideas about details such as that. All considered, this is a large (350 page) double format book, produced to a very high standard, and it is a work of scholarship. It is certain to become a recognized standard work and as such it is a real bargain even at the original published price.

An outstanding book describing a very interesting class of ships in a fascinating era of change. Excellent text, quality photographs and drawings. I absolutely love it.

Gave me many of the technical details of ships on which my grandfather served. Excellently written and I recommend it.

excellent book excellent service

I had no hesitation in buying this book after reading the authors earlier book about British cruisers from 1906 onwards.I don't rate this effort as highly!It goes, almost without saying, that this book is a very polished reference volume covering the ships in the title.It has cracking photographs,exquiste line drawings, all linked together with highly detailed and researched text.The knowledge and craftmanship of the author are obvious thoughout the the publication.If the overall standard of the book is clearly so high,why only four stars?The author describes all the classes of ships from the very early sailing cruisers to the last Armoured cruisers of 1905,each class is dealt with in much the same manner, design features,specifications,excellent diagrams and photographs.Each section is of much the same length and character. Ships which never fired shot in anger get the same treatment as ships which took entire crews to their deaths.Until the the last chapter, the fate of of many of the ships pictured is mentioned only in the last two lines of the photo captions.Overall, The author seems to have overlooked the fact that most of these cruisers,especially the later ones, were very much fighting ships, developement and design features, or faults highlighted by combat, are extremely important.These cruisers had to fight weapons which hadn't been invented when some of them were built. However, fighting qualities or defects get little comment or consideration, even in the rather superficial last chapter.Battle damage or reasons for their loss are scarcely mentionedThe cruisers in the latter part of this book figured in a number of famous disasters. Aboukir,Hogue Cressy,Good Hope,Monmouth, Natal,Defence,Black Prince,Hampshire.These ships had a very bloody history,Why were they so dangerous to their crews? A number of foreign designs are contrasted to the British types,American,Spanish,Japanese,why no German?In my opinion,(sorry to use this expression),a concentration on design specifications and construction details ,even when coupled with really excellent illustrations, does't paint a full, interesting or complete picture of these almost forgotten fighting ships.