With a fierce determination to do good.
It would be a gross exaggeration to claim, as many contemporaries did, that those living in a British colony felt privileged to be ruled by a people anxious to spread the virtues of an ordered, advanced and politically sophisticated Christian nation to those 'lesser breeds' previously 'without the law'. That said, there is no gainsaying the fact that both many colonial administrators and Christian missionaries took on their colonial duties with a fierce determination to do good. Britain's status as the financial capital of the world also secured investment inflows which preserved its immense prosperity. One has only to walk along Liverpool's waterfront and view the exceptional 'Three Graces', (the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, Royal Liver and Cunard buildings) planned and erected in the decade or so after Victoria's death, to understand the centrality of commerce and overseas trade in making Britain the world's greatest power during the 19th century.
Liverpool's status as a World Heritage City is fitting testament to a period when Britain did indeed 'rule the waves'.
Industrial Revolution
Victoria came to the throne during the early, frenetic phase of the world's first industrial revolution. Industrialisation brought with it new markets, a consumer boom and greater prosperity for most of the propertied classes. It also brought rapid, and sometimes chaotic change as towns and cities expanded at a pace which precluded orderly growth.
Life expectancy at birth - in the high 30s
In 1837 - had crept up to 48 by 1901.
Desperately poor housing conditions, long working hours, the ravages of infectious disease and premature death were the inevitable consequence. The Victorians wrestled with this schizoid legacy of industrialism. The Victorian town symbolised Britain's progress and world pre-eminence, but it also witnessed some of the most deprived people, and depraved habits, in the civilised world.
Taming, and then improving, Britain's teeming cities presented a huge challenge. Mortality data revealed that, in the poorer quarters of Britain's larger cities, almost one child in five born alive in the 1830s and 1840s had died by the age of five. Polluted water and damp housing were the main causes.
Death rates in Britain as a whole remained obstinately above 20 per thousand until the 1880s and only dropped to 17 by the end of Victoria's reign.
Life expectancy at birth, in the high 30s in 1837, had crept up to 48 by 1901. One of the great scourges of the age - tuberculosis - remained unconquered, claiming between 60,000 and 70,000 lives in each decade of Victoria's reign.
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Civic engagement
Despite substantial medical advances and well-informed campaigns, progress in public health was desperately slow in Victoria's reign.
This had much to do with healthy scepticism about the opinions of experts, particularly when those experts advocated greater centralised state interference in what they considered to be the proper sphere of local authorities and agencies.
Furthermore, state involvement meant higher taxes and higher taxes were said to hamper both business and job creation. Localism undoubtedly stymied many public health initiatives at least until the last two decades of the reign.
Christian gentlemen considered it a duty
To make legacies to worthy causes.
The Victorian era saw considerable expenditure on monuments to civic pride. The competitive ethic which drove so much business enterprise was channelled by local worthies into spending on opulent town halls and other civic buildings.
By no means all of these were intended for the use of a propertied elite. Libraries, wash-houses and swimming baths were all funded as part of a determination to provide working people with the means to improve themselves.
Civic identity and civic engagement were more powerful forces in Victorian than in early 20th-century Britain.
Nor were the Victorian middle and upper classes parsimonious over charitable giving. The 1860s alone saw the formation of the Society for the Relief of Distress, the Peabody Trust, Barnardo's Homes and the Charity Organisation Society. These national organisations were multiplied several-fold by local charities. Christian gentlemen considered it a duty to make legacies to worthy causes.
True, much of this giving came with strings. Most Victorian charities were aimed at those sections of the working classes disposed towards helping themselves. Its overall impact, however, should not be underestimated.
Ireland
The United Kingdom's population at Victoria's accession in 1837 was about 25.5 million, eight million of whom lived in Ireland. At her death in 1901, it had risen to 41 million. These figures, however, mask an enormous contrast. While the population of England and Wales increased by some 116% (15 million to 32.5 million), that of Ireland almost halved (eight million to 4.5 million), its population declining in every decade of the reign.
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