ABSTRACT
During Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), the British Government and the British people both came to expect and assume that central government should broadly look after the welfare and well-being of the whole population, and should take the initiative in doing so. Defence of the realm and the King’s (or Queen’s) peace might have been part of the unwritten compact between monarch and subjects since medieval times; the governmental climate, however, that still allowed the Irish to starve in their thousands in the 1840s without the then most powerful nation on earth apparently doing much about it was, by the end of that century, long gone – outmoded in part no doubt by the assumptions of a broadening electorate.
