Victoria reigned for 63 years, from 1837 to 1901, and the period bearing her name transformed Britain from a largely rural society into the first industrial nation and the centre of the largest empire in history.
The scale of change
In 1837 most British people lived in the countryside and travelled at the speed of a horse. By 1901 the majority lived in cities, the railway network was essentially complete, and messages crossed the Atlantic in minutes by telegraph cable. Britain’s population roughly doubled, and London grew from under two million to over six.
What the Victorians invented
An extraordinary amount of what feels timelessly British:
- The modern Christmas — the tree popularised by Prince Albert, the first commercial Christmas card in 1843, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol the same year, crackers in the 1840s.
- The postage stamp — the Penny Black, 1840, and with it prepaid national post.
- The police, public libraries, public parks, museums, and compulsory schooling.
- Seaside holidays — created by railways bringing working people to the coast, and with them piers, promenades and Blackpool.
- The sewers — Bazalgette’s system, built after the Great Stink, still in use.
- Association football, rugby, tennis and modern cricket, all codified in this period.
The Great Exhibition
Held in 1851 in the Crystal Palace, a vast prefabricated glass and iron building in Hyde Park. Six million people visited — a third of the British population — to see 100,000 exhibits from around the world. Its profits bought the land in South Kensington that now holds the V&A, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.
The other side
Victorian Britain was also brutally unequal. Children worked in mines and mills until successive Factory Acts stopped them. Life expectancy in industrial slums was around thirty. Cholera killed tens of thousands. The workhouse was the only provision for the destitute, and it was designed to be feared.
The empire that generated the wealth was built on conquest, and famine in India and Ireland — where a million died in the 1840s while food was exported — sits alongside the railways and the reform acts in any honest account.
Victoria herself
She came to the throne at 18 and married her cousin Albert, whose influence on British public life was enormous. His death in 1861 devastated her; she withdrew from public view for years, wore black for the remaining forty, and was widely criticised for the absence before regaining popularity in old age.
The look
Victorian architecture is everywhere in Britain: red brick terraces, Gothic Revival churches and town halls, railway stations built like cathedrals. St Pancras, the Natural History Museum and the Houses of Parliament are the period at its most confident.