Victorian Britain was during the 19th century until just after the 20th century had begun (1837-1901). Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837 at only 18 and was the longest reigning Queen, with a total of 64 years until her death in 1901. This reign was broken by her great great-granddaughter, our current ruler, Queen Elizabeth II who has now reigned for 65 years.
Victoria’s coronation took place during a time when the people of England despised the royal family because of the way they handled things. Victoria took over from her paternal uncle, George IV, who was said to have ‘no limit to his desires, nor any restraint to his profession’ and to contribute more ‘to the demoralisation of society than any prince recorded in the pages of history’ . He may have been one of the most gifted out of the royal princes, but when his accession came in 1820, he had become a national joke and his ‘obsessive self-interest’ and ‘vast expenditure’ on paintings, palaces, parties and mistresses meant he was the epitome of ‘senseless extravagance’.
During Victoria’s reign, Britain was the most powerful country in the world. It may not have been without effort, but Britain was able to withstand a ‘world order’ which hardly ever exposed Britain’s wider strategic interests. In 1882, Britain had almost attained the world’s largest empire. The British Empire had covered ‘one-fifth of the earth’s surface’ by the time Victoria’s reign had come to an end
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The Victorian autodidact stated that ‘his modest successes enabled his ‘betters’ to claim that Britain was a specially advanced, perhaps even a divinely favoured, nation.'
The struggle for political authority was the most ‘sophisticated political duel’ in Britain’s history taking place in the late 1860s and 1870s between William Gladstone and Benjamin