Fit for a Queen | Lapham's Quarterly
8.7.3 As the nineteenth century neared its end, so too did the greatest British life of all. Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, just after her seventy-eighth birthday. Few could recall Britain before Victoria, so epic had been her reign. She had emerged from her deep unpopularity of the 1870s and early 1880s to become the sentimental incarnation not just of the British nineteenth century, when it had finally achieved greatness as the world’s leading power, but of the whole British past. A great pageant was set for June 22, when the Queen would make a progress to St....