ABSTRACT
The term ‘Victorian age’ is often used to cover the whole of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria came to the throne in , at a time when the monarchy as an institution was not particularly popular. But as the success of the nation reached its peak and then began to decline, the monarch assumed a greater and greater symbolic importance. Victoria, widowed in , became Empress of India, and by her death in had come to represent the nation in a way which only Queen Elizabeth I had done in the past.
