Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Empire and Democracy (1837-1913)
The England of Queen Victoria was a hive of industry, and her people boasted that their country was the workshop of the world. But it had become so within the span of a single life. The Queen's grandfather, George III, had ascended the throne of a rural England, a land of placid villages and quiet market-towns, sleepy and not unprosperous, but intellectually stagnant and politically quiescent. Save in a rare moment of national crisis the horizon of peasant and yeoman, parson and squire, was bounded by cattle-fairs and quarter sessions, the land tax and the price of corn. Then the Industrial Revolution had brought stir and change. Vast economic forces had re-shaped the social framework, transformed the texture, and changed the temper of national life. The subjects of Queen Victoria toiled in factories and workshops, or in mines far from the light of day; they dwelt in towns blackened with smoke, alive with the whirr of the loom, and noisy with the clang of the hammer; and the fruits of their labour found a market at the ends of the earth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
