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The Victorian era of the United Kingdom refers to Queen Victoria's rule which began in 1837 and concluded in 1901. Under the rule of Queen Victoria, the British people enjoyed a long period of prosperity. Profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop. Some scholars would extend the beginning of the period—as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victorians—back five years to the passage of Reform Act 1832.

The era was preceded by the Regency era and succeeded by the Edwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and other non-English speaking countries.

Queen Victoria had the longest reign in British history, and the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable. When Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was primarily agrarian and rural (though it was even then the most industrialised country in the world); upon her death, the country was highly industrialised and connected by an expansive railway network. The first decades of Victoria's reign witnessed a series of epidemics (typhus and cholera, most notably), crop failures and economic collapses. There were riots over enfranchisement and the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had been established to protect British agriculture during the Napoleonic Wars in the early part of the 19th century.


Queen Victoria (shown here on the morning of her ascension to the Throne, 20 June 1837)Discoveries by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin began to examine centuries of the assumptions about humanity and the world, about science and history, and, finally, about religion and philosophy. As the country grew increasingly connected by an expansive network of...