her reward. During her reign the seas were swept clear of foreign
foes, and her country took its place in the front rank of Great Powers.
Hers was the Golden Age of Literature, of Adventure and Learning,
an age of great men and women, a New England.

If an Elizabethan Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep and awakened again
at the opening of Victoria's reign, more than 200 years later, what
would he have found? England still a mighty Power, it is true,
scarcely yet recovered from the long war against Napoleon, with
Nelson and Wellington enthroned as the national heroes. But the times
were bad in many ways, for it was "a time of ugliness: ugly religion,
ugly law, ugly relations between rich and poor, ugly clothes, ugly
furniture."

The England of that day, it must be remembered, was the England
described so faithfully in Charles Dickens' early works. It was far
from being the England we know now. In 1836 appeared the first number
of Mr Pickwick's travels. _The Pickwick Papers_ is not a great work
of humour merely, for in its pages we see England and the early
Victorians--a strange country to us--in which they lived.

It is an England of old inns and stagecoaches, where "manners and
roads were very rough"; where men were still cast into prison for
debt and lived and died there; where the execution of a criminal still
took place in public; where little children of tender years were
condemned to work in the depths of coal-pits, and amid the clang and
roar of machinery. It was a hard, cruel age. No longer did the people
look up to and reverence their monarch as their leader. England had
yet to pass through a long and bitter period of 'strife and stress,'
of war between rich and poor, of many and bewildering changes. The