On 23 September 1896, Queen Victoria became Britain’s longest reigning monarch. The next day, the Manchester Guardian published Congratulations To Her Majesty - reports of the demonstrations of loyalty from various dignitaries and members of the clergy.

Manchester Guardian, 24 September 1896. Read more messages of congratulation.



The piece was followed by a look at previous Long Reigns of the Past. Apart from this, though, there was little else in the paper about the monarch’s record, save for a roundup of how the press - both at home and abroad - had reported the event:

Both the “Neue Freie Presse” and the “Neues Wiener Tagblatt” devote most sympathetic leading articles to the attainment by Queen Victoria of a longer reign than any of her predecessors. The “Neue Freie Presse” says the festive occasion calls to mind at a fitting moment how little justified is the pharisaical depreciation of Great Britain. Even now no Power in the world can boast that its name is better known by sea and land, its flag more established, than are the name, the flag, and the fame of Great Britain.

26 September 1896

Manchester Guardian, 26 September 1896.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Statue of Queen Victoria on Blackfriars Bridge, London, by Charles Bell Birch (1896). Photograph: Alamy

An Unexampled Reign, the Manchester Guardian’s long and detailed editorial about the Queen, appeared on 22 September. It included the following excerpt:

Throughout Her majesty’s reign the war drum has throbbed almost without intermission. First came our war against Dost Mohammed, with the bitter lessons which we learned at Cabul in 1841-2. Then followed in rapid succession our first war with China, our Indian and Sikh wars, our campaigns in New Zealand, Kaffraria, on the north-west frontiers of India, in the Punjaub, and in Burmah. In 1854 the forty years of European peace were rudely ended and England was at war with Russia. Scarcely had we emerged from that terrible encounter when the Indian Mutiny broke upon us with its three years of struggle and horror. In 1860 we were fighting in China, 1807 in Abyssinia, in 1867 in Abyssinia, in 1873 in Ashanti, and since then in Afghanistan, in Zululand, in the Transvaal. The long and melancholy record is closed by the crowning follies and miseries of our Egyptian campaign of 1882-5 and the squalid tale of “little wars” which have succeeded it. Of these one of the most wanton and useless is now in full progress in Egypt, and a second no less due to our own faults and follies is not yet completed in South Africa. It is painful to contrast this statement of the actual fact with the prophecies of a golden age of peace and goodwill, when the International Exhibition of 1851 was to be the outward and visible inauguration of a brotherhood of nations, when reason and equity were henceforth to settle the disputes of mankind, and the rivalry of peoples was to be limited to a generous competition for pre-eminence in the arts which adorn life and the sciences which enrich it. It certainly is not satisfactory either to the moralist or to the philosopher that as we approach the twentieth century of Christian civilisation we should have improved so little on the manners of those primaeval monsters that “tare each other in the slime,” and should have discovered no durable substitute for the horrible arbitrament of the sword.

Read An Unexampled Reign in full.