What is it about Victorian England that simultaneously fascinates and repels us? The other day I took my 10-year-old daughter, Agatha, on the bus and subway in Victorian dress. She was going on a trip with her classmates to the Ragged School, where poor children once received a rudimentary education and which is now a museum.

It was all great fun for Aggie, but when I asked her if she would like to have lived in those days, she reacted with horror. “No, of course not, Dad!” The image of the Victorians that has been passed down to her by teachers is relentlessly negative. It is the contrast between the poverty of the masses and the hypocrisy of the rich that has captivated our collective imagination.

This image was originally formed by the great reformers and philanthropists, by Dickens and other writers, who combined to create a folk memory of child labor, the workhouse, and the criminal underclass.

Yet the enduring power of this sentimental imagery over our historical imagination is really a paradox. The poor, to coin a phrase, have always been with us, but the Victorians were perhaps the first to notice them and to do something for them as a society. True, there were many more poor people, not least for demographic reasons — the population of England almost quadrupled in a century — but that does not entirely explain why they were more visible than ever before. It was the concatenation of freedom, both political and economic, democratic representation, and the rule of law, together with the revival of Judaeo-Christian morality that made it possible for the “idea of poverty” to take hold of the “moral imagination” of Victorian society on a scale that previously did not exist. And the historian who has done most to teach us about this revolution in sensibility is actually an American: Gertrude Himmelfarb.

It is a tribute to this extraordinary woman that at the grand old age of 85 — though she looks at least 20 years younger — her name was mentioned this week in an oped piece in the London Times as the “nuclear option” for the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge, England. The author, the British historian, and TV presenter Tristram Hunt, admitted that “at her impressive age,” this “New Yorker born and bred … will not be swapping Central Park for the Cambridge Fens.”

No indeed, especially as Ms. Himmelfarb and her husband Irving Kristol moved to Washington D.C. from New York some years ago. More serious than this inaccuracy and the inherent improbability of the whole idea (Quentin Skinner, the retiring Regius Professor, is only 67) was the idiocy of describing her as “this great doyenne of reactionary history” who has “somehow inveigled the Prime Minister under her spell.”

I am surprised that Mr. Hunt should call such a champion of the Enlightenment and of Victorian liberalism a “reactionary” — especially as he does not use the language of prejudice when referring to the candidate he considers the favorite, Professor Richard Evans, who makes no secret of his Left-wing credentials.

The reason why politics matters in this academic appointment is that the Regius chairs at Oxford are, nominally at least, in the gift of the Crown, which, in practice, means the prime minister. It is true that Gordon Brown claims to have read at least one of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s books, “The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments” — much to the consternation of his fellow socialists. But I have yet to see the slightest evidence that Mr. Brown’s reading of the Himmelfarb corpus has had the slightest impact on his policies in government.

It is, of course, an anomaly that Mr. Brown should appoint a professor of history at one of the world’s leading universities. Such things do not normally happen outside dictatorships. But it is a very English anomaly. The Regius chairs are royal foundations and — the English being predominantly a nation of monarchists — have traditionally enjoyed greater prestige than others.

In general, prime ministers do not abuse their privilege and appoint as Regius professors whoever they are advised by the universities are finest scholars of the day. One of the most eminent Victorian liberals, Lord Acton, held the Regius chair of history at Cambridge — and one of his most eminent biographers is, as it happens, Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Only once in my lifetime was there controversy about such an appointment. In 1957 Harold Macmillan, the prime minister between 1957 and 1963, gave the Regius chair of history at Oxford to his friend and fellow Tory Hugh Trevor-Roper, passing over his Left-wing rival A.J.P. Taylor. The affair aroused great passions at the time, although the two historians were roughly equal in popularity and merit. If anything, Trevor-Roper’s books now read better than Taylor’s.

In our time, professorships matter less than they once did, and historians’ ideas matter much more than their academic posts. If the English moral imagination is ever to recover the social conscience and genuine compassion that our Victorian ancestors displayed, Gertrude Himmelfarb should be required reading in our schools and universities — not because of some prime ministerial diktat, but because she tells the truth about a past that has not yet entirely passed away.