Queen Victoria (1819-1901) [HISTORICAL] was the Queen of Britain from 18 years old in 1837 to her death in 1901. Her 60 year reign was the longest of any monarch in Great Britain until Queen Elizabeth II.  The period of her reign is now known as The Victorian Age, known for its consolidation of Britain as a world power, the rise of fossil-fuel powered industrialization and thriving literature. While Queen Victoria did not support women's suffrage or high education for women, Queen Victoria herself was well-read and an admirer of literature especially poetry. She journalled all her life and published several collections of memoirs and journal entires such as Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, as well as a sequel Leaves and More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highllands which she hoped would: "support a full community of interests, a constant exchange of good offices, and a kindly respect felt and expressed by each class ... in the great brotherhood that forms a nation" (Tobias 8). Unfortunately, most of her journals were burned by her daughter Beatrice after the Queen's death.   

In Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the protagonist Orlando never meets Queen Victoria like he does her predecessor Queen Elizabeth, but Orlando feels the affects of Queen Victoria's reign on 19th century England. The presence of smoke and smog generated by urban industrialization trouble Orlando and demonstrate the opposition between the character's love of nature and the state of the country in the 1800's.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.