How long could so few govern so many? The early Victorians had seen themselves as ancient Romans – but now others remembered how Rome, too, had fallen. And society had been revolutionised: power had shifted from the aristocracy to the middle class, and now also to the workers whose labour had made industrial Britain great. The people’s century was dawning. These profound changes brought fear and misgivings in their wake – but not to all. Victoria died at Osborne on 22 January 1901 and, when the immediate shock had passed (after all, practically no one, except the very old, could recall what life was like without her), there came amid all other feelings a sense of relief, the prospect of a new sovereign and of a new century. As Virginia Woolf, emancipated from the Stephen family when she moved to Bloomsbury in 1904, put it: ‘Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different; everything was on trial. We are going to do without napkins … to
have coffee after dinner, instead of tea at nine o’clock.’