The Modern Age, in its most distinctive developments, is almost coeval with the reign of his successor. It is true that the Railway service had already begun; but it was still in its infancy when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and had not yet effected any great revolution in the sentiments or habits of society. The Electric Telegraph, though fully born in the brains of scientific speculators, had received no practical application. Steam and machinery had still to achieve some of their greatest triumphs. The Postal system of those days seems barbarian to our modern eyes. The Newspaper Press was an insignificant force compared with what it is at the present day. Education, in the popular sense, hardly existed. Nation with nation held but little intercourse, and the prejudices of Englishmen were scarcely less gross than they had been in the days of Hogarth. Manners were far more coarse and brutal than they are now; the laws were more complicated and uncertain; social order was less secure; the arts had not attained so wide and general a culture; medicine, surgery, chemistry, geology, and other sciences, were less cultivated; taste was less diffused and less instructed; the luxuries, and even the comforts, of domestic life were almost unknown to the poorer classes; and political power was held by only a small proportion of the community. The England of 1837 was so different from the England we now behold, that the “Pickwick Papers,” belonging to that date, require explanatory notes for the benefit of a younger generation. The history of these vast changes—in which the personal character and influence of her Majesty have had no small share—must be of the deepest interest to all thinking men; and it is this history which we propose to relate.
Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, was born at Kensington Palace on the 24th of May, 1819. She is the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III.; and her mother was Victoria Mary Louisa, daughter of his Serene Highness Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The Duke of Kent was the second husband of this lady, who in 1802 had married Charles Louis, Prince of
WEST FRONT OF KENSINGTON PALACE.
Leiningen—an ill-assorted match, productive of no happiness. The second marriage took place in 1818; but the Duke of Kent died in less than two years. Her Majesty’s descent is very illustrious. It may be traced (conjecturally, at least) up to Odoacer, a warlike chief of the Heruli, who, after defeating the forces of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor of the West, in the year 476 of the Christian era, disputed the kingdom of Italy with Theodoric the Ostrogoth. One of the supposed descendants of Odoacer was Boniface, Count of Lucca and Duke of Tuscany, who lived in the early part of the ninth century, and from whom sprang Alberto Azzo II., Marquis of Italy and Lord of Este, who, in the first half of the eleventh century, married Cunegonda, of the House of Guelph, by whom he had Guelph, Duke of Bavaria, the ancestor of the House of Brunswick, and consequently of the present Royal Family of Great Britain, who are called Este-Guelphs. According to some accounts, however, the Guelphs are derived from a younger brother of Odoacer, whose son, Olfigandus, held a command in the army of Belisarius. But in truth
KING WILLIAM IV.
these matters lie beyond verification, and are interesting only as affording a shadowy link between the present and the past.