Introduction The 19th century often seems entirely different from contemporary life, in ways both big and small. Victorian families valued privacy, a strong con- trast with the age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Nineteenth-century social life was also much more formal than today no prime minister in Victoria’s reign preferred to be addressed by his first name. (One simply cannot imagine William Gladstone telling his staff to “call him Bill.”) Victorians in photographs sat with stiff postures and solemn expressions, draped in several layers of clothing, complete with hats and gloves. They addressed each other by their surnames in public (and sometimes in private), made family dinners an elaborate ritual, and had social rounds that followed seemingly unending rules of etiquette and courtesy. How can they not seem staid and unbending to contemporary Britons? Yet the echoes of familiarity also abound, particularly the rapidity of the change through which 19th-century people lived. During the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), Britain went from an emerging power with a mostly commercial empire to a global industrial leader with the largest territorial empire in the world. In 1837, horses and sailing ships were the normal modes of transportation by 1901, railways and steamships had changed transportation forever. The telegraph had reduced the amount of time to communicate across the globe to a matter of hours, while the penny post made letter writing affordable for the poorest Briton. It was, in its own way, an age of information. The number of transformations during Victoria’s reign was one reason Victorian Britain is both distant and close, remembered, but in a fractured, incomplete way.
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