Queen Victoria | Page 2

the England we know now. In 1836 appeared the first number of
Mr Pickwick's travels. The Pickwick Papers is not a great work of
humour merely, for in its pages we see England and the early
Victorians--a strange country to us--in which they lived.
It is an England of old inns and stagecoaches, where "manners and
roads were very rough"; where men were still cast into prison for debt
and lived and died there; where the execution of a criminal still took
place in public; where little children of tender years were condemned to
work in the depths of coal-pits, and amid the clang and roar of
machinery. It was a hard, cruel age. No longer did the people look up to
and reverence their monarch as their leader. England had yet to pass
through a long and bitter period of 'strife and stress,' of war between
rich and poor, of many and bewildering changes. The introduction of
coal, steam, and mechanism was rapidly changing the character of the
whole country. The revenue had grown from about 19,000,000 pounds
in 1792 to 105,000,000 pounds in 1815, and there seemed to be no limit
to the national wealth and resources.

But these very changes which enriched some few were the cause of
misery and poverty to struggling thousands. Machinery had ruined the
spinning-wheel industry and reduced the price of cloth; the price of
corn had risen, and, after the close of the great war, other nations were
free once again to compete against our country in the markets where we
so long had possessed the monopoly of trade.
[Illustration: The Queen's first Council at Kensington Palace Photo
W.A. Mansell & Co.]
The period which followed the year 1815 was one of incessant struggle
for reform, and chiefly the reform of a Parliament which no longer
represented the people's wishes. Considerably more than half the
members were not elected at all, but were recommended by patrons.
The average price of a seat in Parliament was 5000 pounds for a
so-called 'rotten borough.' Scotland returned forty-five members and
Cornwall forty-four members to Parliament! The reformers also
demanded the abolition of the 'taxes on knowledge,' by which was
meant the stamp duty of fourpence on every copy of a newspaper, a
duty of threepence on every pound of paper, and a heavy tax upon
advertisements. The new Poor Laws aroused bitter discontent. Instead
of receiving payment of money for relief of poverty, as had formerly
been the case, the poor and needy were now sent to the 'Union'
workhouse.
A series of bad harvests was the cause of great migrations to the factory
towns, and the already large ranks of the unemployed grew greater day
by day. The poverty and wretchedness of the working class is painted
vividly for us by Carlyle when he speaks of "half a million handloom
weavers, working 15 hours a day, in perpetual inability to procure
thereby enough of the coarsest food; Scotch farm-labourers, who 'in
districts the half of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can
procure no milk' . . . the working-classes can no longer go on without
government, without being actually guided and governed."
Such was Victoria's England when she ascended the throne, a young
girl, nineteen years of age.

CHAPTER II
: _Childhood Days
On the western side of Kensington Gardens stands the old Palace, built
originally in the solid Dutch style for King William and Mary. The
great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, made notable additions to it, and
it was still further extended in 1721 for George the First.
Within its walls passed away both William and his Queen, Queen Anne
and her husband, and George the Second. After this time it ceased to be
a royal residence.
The charm of Kensington Gardens, with its beautiful walks and
secluded sylvan nooks--the happy hunting-ground of London children
and the home of 'Peter Pan'--has inspired many writers to sing its
praises:
In this lone, open glade I lie, Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye, Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine
trees stand!
Birds here make song, each bird has his, Across the girding city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is! How thick the tremulous sheep cries
come!
Here at my feet what wonders pass, What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass! An air-stirred forest, fresh and
clear. MATTHEW ARNOLD
Beaconsfield spoke of its "sublime sylvan solitude superior to the
cedars of Lebanon, and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of
Anatolia."
Kensington Palace was the birthplace of Queen Victoria, and in the
garden walks she used to play, little knowing that she would one day be
Queen of England. Her doll's house and toys are still preserved in the