The Victorians, so widely sneered at for much of the 20th century, are in fashion again. Incredibly, in 1963 art dealer Jeremy Maas was unable to find a British buyer who would pay £1,000 for Frederic Leighton's Flaming June and, as a result, the painting went to Puerto Rico, where it has been hanging ever since in the Museo de Arte de Ponce alongside what is perhaps the supreme masterpiece of late-Victorian art, Edward Burne-Jones's The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Both pictures are currently on loan to Tate Britain while the Museo de Ponce is refurbished. As well as being major artworks in themselves, they are reminders of how seriously we now take the Victorian aesthetic.

Jeremy Paxman's television series on the Victorian painters, which started last Sunday, is part of this rehabilitation. This book might be a tie-in, but it is also a real contribution to art history, introducing the reader to a rich mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Atkinson Grimshaw's damp, moonlit northern towns are known to many of us; Eyre Crowe's fine painting of mill girls - The Dinner Hour, Wigan (1874) - is not. Hubert von Herkomer's On Strike (1891) is a marvellous picture, the haggard wife and children leaning on the shoulders of a determined Bolshie who looks like Richard Ingrams's long-lost uncle, furiously determined to win victory for the proletariat.

Whether Paxman is showing us ragamuffins by the side of the Thames in Dorothy Tennant's Street Arabs at Play, or a lolling Prince of Wales in Henry Emmerson's The Prince of Wales at Cragside, commissioned by the house's owner, armaments millionaire William Armstrong, he always has something interesting to say, skilfully drawing out the contradictions at the heart of Victorian society.

In a remarkably short space, he covers a great deal of ground, taking in the commercial success of the era; the ruthlessness towards the poor and the downtrodden peoples of the colonies; the often kinky sexuality that went with the habit of turning a blind eye to squalor; and the profound influence of still-unwrecked nature that ran side by side with a fascination with the darker sides of cities.

The book certainly taught me things about the Victorians that I either did not know or had not thought about with sufficient imagination. I was particularly struck by the reading of William Dyce's Pegwell Bay, a painting that gives the viewer a weird feeling of unease. In the spectacle of the comet that trails above a family searching for fossils on an empty beach, Paxman finds a representation of the "conglomeration of anxieties and concerns that loomed large" as advances in science began to profoundly change the Victorians' once secure sense of their place in the world.

Anyone who loves Victorian art will bring their own cavils to Paxman's text. Insufficient praise is given to George Watts - but at least he gets a mention. (One of the great scandals of Tate Britain is that it keeps nearly all Watts's masterpieces in its basement.) When I was sitting on the English Heritage committee to decide who deserved a blue plaque, I was thunderstruck by the fact that William Dyce, one of the very greatest British artists of all time, and the personal favourite of the Prince Consort, was turned down as being of less eminence than Jimi Hendrix or Dodie Smith. Paxman does not make that mistake - he gives Dyce his due.

As you would expect, the constraints of space lead to occasional lacunae. In the discussion of child mortality, we are told that the Rev Archibald Campbell Tait lost five daughters in five weeks from scarlet fever - but not that he went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. There are some good reflections upon Dickie Doyle's extraordinary painting The Fairy Tree, but it would surely be natural at this point to have noted that Doyle's more famous nephew, Arthur Conan, came to believe in actual fairies, as a result of a photographic hoax based on this very painting. To say that John Everett Millais "would go on to marry the much-put-upon Effie Ruskin after the annulment of the Ruskin marriage" is true - but the uninformed reader should have been told that Effie fell in love with Millais while he was painting her husband's portrait during an agonisingly long, rainy summer in Scotland. And why is the painting not here? It is one of Millais's best.

But if I were to make only one criticism of the book, I would say that this view of the 19th century seen through the eyes of its painters does not suggest much understanding of the greatest Victorian art critic, John Ruskin. We are told of Ruskin's Protestant objections to Charles Allston Collins's Convent Thoughts (now hanging in the Ashmolean in Oxford), but we needed a modification of this view of him as a "stern" realist. There's nothing here of the Ruskin who felt a spiritual awakening after copying frescoes in the Campo Santo in Pisa. And how can it be fair to say that the man who coined the phrase "the storm clouds of the 19th century" "preferred to skirt" the "uncomfortable subject" of religious doubt? Damn it, he would not lie about his agnosticism, even though it lost him the love of his life, Rose la Touche.

 AN Wilson's books include The Victorians (Arrow).