Victorian Age

One of my favourite books from the Victorian era is Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, which is about three men taking a rowing boat up the Thames on holiday. It gives a wonderful picture of this popular pastime int he Vicorian age. I would love to be able to see the Thames as it was in those days, crowded with boats of all kinds.

It was a very interesting age. It was a time of enormous change - huge advances in technology, science, and medicine, improvements to the educational system, more legal rights, better education, and career opportunities for women, the beginning of Trade Unionism. It was a time of great writers like Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thomas hardy etc. It was the age of the music hall, and the wonderful operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. And of course it was the age of the fascinating Queen Victoria herself.