It was not an imperial occasion but a universal event planned to demonstrate how far mankind, inside the outside Europe, had travelled on its historic journey. It was planned also to provide "a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions;. George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Albert Memorial to commemorate him, chose as themes for the four corners of its base the continents Europe, Asia, Africa and America.

Whatever the scope and.scale of Albert's personal contribution to the history of his time it was the Queen who gave her name not only to the adjective "Victorian" that identifies and still identifies a whole "era" but to a noun "Victorianism", a bundle of associated qualities, among them work and duty, which during the last decades of the twentieth century have been frequently called "Victorian values". Few monarchs have been associated with an -ism which like all -isms has ist disciples and its critics. As for the adjective, it was coined before Albert died. In 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, E.P. Hood, a dissenting minister, employed it in his book The Age and Its Architects, a challenging book which emphasises the variety of Victorian attitudes and phenomena. If required to preach a sermon, he would doubtless have dwelt on the blessings of providence. It was, after all, providential that Alexandrina Victoria, who had been only fifth in line of succession on 24 May 1819, the day she was born, had ascended the throne at all. Only the early death of her father, followed by that of her grandfather, George IV, brought her closer to it, and her uncle William IV, who preceded her on the throne refused until his dying day to call her "Heir Apparent".

There may have been "Victorianism" under other names or without a name before Victoria, but there would have been no Victorians if the Queen through her character as well as her inheritance had not ascended the throne. The adjective "Victorian" has subsequently been applied to objects as well as to individuals -- a development that would have fascinated Albert -- and not only to conduct but to the constitution which Victoria as a girl pledged herself to support and Albert as a young foreign prince set out to understand. Neither Albert nor Victoria fully represented the era over which the Queen presided, as she herself would have admitted -- who could have done? -- but no account of the era is complete unless they are allowed to figure in it almost as prominently as they figured at the time.