FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW, 193
THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING MILLIONS, 220
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA, 238
FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES, 311
TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE, 320
NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES, 380
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, 398
THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY, 408
THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND COLONIAL, 422
TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED
Difference between English society in the earlier and later years of the Queen's reign illustrated from the composition of Hyde Park crowds, first, when the Park was a playground for the Royal children, and a parade ground for social celebrities, secondly, as it has become since. Different generations of Victorian Royalty. Great noblemen, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Eglinton, Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Shaftesbury, The Duke of Wellington. Statesmen, Earl Grey, Sir Robert Peel. Other celebrities, social, or intellectual, or literary. The dandies, some of them sketched by Thackeray, Morgan O'Connell, the original of 'The O'Mulligan,' Alfred Montgomery, Alexis Soyer, Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, 1848-51. Tall forms of Thackeray and Jacob Omnium overtopping the crowd. The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, on horseback. The absence in later days of eminent individuals like these; the old editor and the new. A. W. Kinglake among the last riders in Hyde Park of veterans who write. Commerce in the Park and in society represented by 'King' Hudson before and after his fall. Lord Tollemache, of Peckforton, the last of great nobles familiar to English crowds.
As it is to-day, so, during the earlier years of the present reign, both before and after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park was the social parade ground, not only of the capital, but of the Kingdom. Then, as now, its human panorama was the representative reflection of the social conditions not less than of the typical personages of the era.
Throughout the later forties or the fifties, the loungers from the provinces were certainly not less numerous in Hyde Park than to-day. Foreign visitors were beginning to be a feature in the Metropolitan summer. But the scale on which the London season half a century ago was observed was so small as to resemble but faintly its successors known to the present generation. Society scarcely exceeded the dimensions of a family party. Hyde Park itself seemed a Royal pleasure ground first, a popular resort afterwards, to which strangers were, as to the Park at Windsor, admitted by favour of the first Constitutional Sovereign, to behold the pastimes of the rising generations of Royalty. The little boy and girl, steering their ponies through the maze of carriages, horses, or pedestrians, were the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. Observers noted with appreciative criticism the progress made from day to day by the young riders. Other of the Queen's descendants of age still more tender, followed with their parents in an open carriage, the exact build of which had been introduced by the Prince Consort, and were manifestly being instructed by their father or mother in the art of acknowledging gracefully the respectful salutations of spectators.