I am privileged as a historian of Victorian England to deliver this Memorial Lecture on the occasion of the 170th anniversary of George Eliot\u27s birth. The future Queen was born on May 24th 1819, described by her father as \u27 a model of strength and beauty combined\u27: George Eliot was born at five o\u27clock in the morning on November 22nd. This was the year of the Massacre of Peterloo, when discontent and repression drove the Lancashire radical Samuel Bamford to ask in his poem \u27The Lancashire Hymn\u27
\u27Have we not heard the infant\u27s cry
And mark\u27d its mother\u27s tear;
That look, which told us mournfully
That woe and want were there?\u27
Infants born in 1819 had very different life chances; George Eliot soon became aware of this. And although \u27woe and want\u27 were not to be the main themes in Queen Victoria\u27s long reign, which started eighteen years later, they were never to be absent. A more familiar theme was to be \u27plenitude\u27. There were more \u27things\u27 around than there ever had been before - and more new things: \u27novelty\u27 went with \u27plenitude\u27. At the end of the reign even among socialists the theme was less \u27woe and want\u27 than \u27poverty in the midst of plenty\u27
