ABSTRACT
On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died. The nation mourned the end of a period in the history of Britain and the world. ‘The queen is dead … and the great Victorian age is at an end … It will mean great changes in the world’ wrote one contemporary diarist (Wilfred Scawen Blunt, quoted in Smith 1964: v); ‘it was as if an essential wheel from the machine of the Empire, and indeed of the world, had slipped from its spindle’ commented E. F. Benson (1930: 336). In sombre tones, editorials in newspapers around the world lamented the Queen’s passing. Publishers rushed to issue nostalgic biographies and surveys of the reign. At a meeting at 10 Downing Street in May the Victoria League was founded to preserve the ideals the Queen was taken to stand for by promoting the idea of empire. A flurry of activity saw statues of Victoria take a prominent place in the public realm of towns and cities across the empire. Not all responses were uncritical (George Bernard Shaw denounced the Queen’s ten-day lying-in state as ‘insanitary’, recommending that she be quickly cremated or given a shallow burial in a perishable coffin [Holroyd 1989: 58]), but throughout the first half of the twentieth century autobiographers and novelists constructed the Queen’s death and state funeral as a moment of crisis and caesura in the narrative of British history. In the Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy conjured the response of the watching crowds: ‘a murmuring groan from all the long line of those who watched. … so unconscious, so primitive, deep and wild … Tribute of an age to its own death. … The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears.’ Even his worldly hero Soames saw the event as ‘supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period’ (Galsworthy 1922: 512, 518).
