routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
(Robert Browning, Pippa Passes)
CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS
The term ‘Victorian age’ is often used to cover the whole of the
nineteenth century. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, at a
time when the monarchy as an institution was not particularly popular.
But as the success of the nation reached its peak and then began to
decline, the monarch assumed a greater and greater symbolic
importance. Victoria, widowed in 1861, became Empress of India,
and by her death in 1901 had come to represent the nation in a way
which only Queen Elizabeth I had done in the past.
A history of the Victorian age records a period of economic
expansion and rapid change. If change can be measured by change
to the capital city of a country, then the history of the growth of
London during this century is revealing. When Queen Victoria came
to the throne, the population of London was about two million
inhabitants; at her death in 1901, the population had increased to 6.5
million. The growth of London and of other major cities in Great
Britain marked a final stage in the change from a way of life based on
the land to a modern urban economy based on manufacturing,
international trade and financial institutions.
Great Britain was one of the first countries of the world to industrialise,
to establish markets and to reinvest the profits in further manufacturing
developments. Britain became the centre of the new philosophy of Free
Trade, of new technology and of continuing industrial inventions. The
country became the workshop of the world, and from the 1870s onwards
had become the world’s banker. In a period of little more than sixty years