ers_ is not a great work
of humour merely, for in its pages we see England and the early
Victorians--a strange country to us--in which they lived.

It is an England of old inns and stagecoaches, where "manners and
roads were very rough"; where men were still cast into prison for
debt and lived and died there; where the execution of a criminal still
took place in public; where little children of tender years were
condemned to work in the depths of coal-pits, and amid the clang and
roar of machinery. It was a hard, cruel age. No longer did the people
look up to and reverence their monarch as their leader. England had
yet to pass through a long and bitter period of 'strife and stress,'
of war between rich and poor, of many and bewildering changes. The
introduction of coal, steam, and mechanism was rapidly changing the
character of the whole country. The revenue had grown from about
19,000,000 pounds in 1792 to 105,000,000 pounds in 1815, and there
seemed to be no limit to the national wealth and resources.

But these very changes which enriched some few were the cause of
misery and poverty to struggling thousands. Machinery had ruined the
spinning-wheel industry and reduced the price of cloth; the price
of corn had risen, and, after the close of the great war, other
nations were free once again to compete against our country in the
markets where we so long had possessed the monopoly of trade.

[Illustration: The Queen's first Council at Kensington Palace
Photo W.A. Mansell & Co.]

The period which followed the year 1815 was one of incessant struggle
for reform, and chiefly the reform of a Parliament which no
longer represented the people's wishes. Considerably more than half
the members were not elected at all, but were recommended by patrons.

The average price of a seat in Parliament was 5000 pounds for a
so-called 'rotten borough.' Scotland returned forty-five members
and Cornwall forty-four members to Parliament! The reformers also
demanded the abolition of the 'taxes on knowledge,' by which was
meant the stamp duty of fourpence on every copy of a newspaper, a
duty of threepence on every pound of paper, and a heavy tax upon
advertisements. The new Poor Laws aroused bitter discontent. Instead
of receiving payment of money for relief of poverty, as had formerly
been the case, the poor and needy were now sent to the 'Union'
workhouse.

A series of bad harvests was the cause of great migrations to the
factory towns