Who's who in Victorian Britain - Roger Ellis

Part of an eight-volume series providing short biographies of men and women from Roman to Victorian times, Who's Who in Victorian Britain is concerned with the 'Age of Empire.' Victoria was the first English monarch to see her name given to the period of her reign while she was still alive: it was used as early as 1851. There were enough constant factors through-out the Victorian Age to give coherence to it. With the Royal Navy enforcing the Pax Britannica over much of the world, affording protection to shipping and trade, piracy virtually disappeared. There were large additions to the Empire and the Queen became Empress of India. Britain's statesmen, and the Queen through her family connections with other royal monarchs, sought to hold the balance of power between the conflicting ambitions and shifting fortunes of the other European empires. But at the end of her reign the Boer War introduced a note of uncertainty. Domestically, the period saw an oligarchic constitution being adapted in stages to an industrial society. It was the age when Britain was manufacturer to the world, but at some cost to the working class whose needs were taken up by writers, thinkers and reformers. Into a religious age, the seeds of doubt were sown by Darwin and the new Biblical critics. Each of the 190 short biographical essays places the subject in the context of their age and evokes what was distinctive and interesting about their personality and achievement. The biographies are arranged in a broadly chronological rather than alphabetical sequence so that the reader may easily browse from one contemporary to the next. The index, with its many cross-references, reveals further linkages between contemporaries. Each volume is a portrait of an age, presenting history in a biographical form which complements the conventional approach.