Ireland lost more than one million people
To the famine in the 1840s.
This stark contrast is explained by two linked factors. Ireland, the Protestant north east around Belfast excepted, did not experience an industrial revolution in the Victorian age. It also endured a devastating famine from 1845 - 1847, the result of a failed potato crop among a peasant population dangerously dependent on one food source for sheer existence.
Ireland lost more than one million people to the ravages of famine in the 1840s. It lost far more over the next half century to the steady drip of emigration to Britain, the Americas and Australia.
This ticking demographic timebomb had far-reaching consequences. Large numbers of Irish Catholics - both those who stayed and those who left - blamed the British government for the famine and saw in it the ultimate proof that the Act of Union had been a ruse from which Britain benefited and for which Ireland continued to suffer.
The famine extinguished any realistic hope that the Irish, like the Scots a century earlier, might come to realise the economic, commercial and cultural benefits of political union with a larger and more prosperous national partner.
Inevitably, 'home rule' campaigns grew in both numbers and violence in the second half of Victoria's reign. These also impacted massively on British politics. 'The Irish Question' dominated the last phase of the career of William Gladstone, probably Victoria's ablest - and certainly her most driven - prime minister. His Liberal party's split on home rule for Ireland in 1886 began the long process of marginalisation of the political party which dominated much of the queen's reign. Ireland would not get home rule in Victoria's lifetime, but it set the political agenda unlike any other issue.
Politics
What, finally, of the Victorian political structure? It is easy to see that it was far from democratic.
At the beginning of Victoria's reign, about a fifth of adult males were entitled to vote. That proportion increased, through parliamentary reform acts passed in 1867 and 1884, to one-third and two-thirds respectively.
No women could legally vote in parliamentary elections until almost 18 years after Victoria's death - and the queen herself was no suffragist. Women did, however, play an increasingly influential role both in locally-elected school and poor law boards and in local government from the 1870s onwards.
During the Victorian era, the United Kingdom
Could plausibly be considered the world's superpower.
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If not democratic, the political system was becoming increasingly representative. By 1901, few argued - as had frequently been asserted against the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s - that to allow working men to vote would be to cede power to an ignorant, insensate and unworthy majority.
Victorian politicians increasingly learned how to 'trust the people'. They also noted how many among 'lower orders' could help themselves economically while improving themselves educationally.
The working-class Victorian autodidact was an increasingly significant figure. His modest successes enabled his 'betters' to claim that Britain was a specially advanced, perhaps even a divinely favoured, nation.
Britain managed to modernize its political system without succumbing to the political revolutions that afflicted virtually all of its European competitors.
The quality of political debate in Victorian Britain, in newspapers and in both houses of parliament, was also very high. The struggle for political supremacy between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli in the late 1860s and 1870s represents perhaps the most sophisticated political duel in the nation's history.
During the Victorian era, then, the United Kingdom could plausibly be considered as the world's superpower. However, Germany and the United States had already begun to surpass its industrial capacity and Germany's naval build-up would shortly present a powerful challenge to long-held British supremacy.
On the home front, the nation was only beginning to get to grips with widespread poverty while considerably more than half the adult population remained without a vote. Victorian supremacy by 1901 was only skin deep.
The Victorian Age was characterised by rapid change and developments in nearly every sphere - from advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge to changes in population growth and location. Over time, this rapid transformation deeply affected the country's mood: an age that began with a confidence and optimism leading to economic boom and prosperity eventually gave way to uncertainty and doubt regarding Britain's place in the world.
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