Imperial Expansion and/as Historical Progress: Space and Time in British Poetry on the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria

Three royal jubilees – George III’s Jubilee (1809) and Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees (1887 and 1897) – were celebrated in nineteenth-century Britain. As anniversaries marking a significant milestone in the long-lasting rule of British monarchs, these public events provided poets with the perfect occasion to compose poems that take stock of the health condition of the British imperial nation at different stages of its history. The celebrations of Victoria’s fifty-year-long reign held in the period of so-called high imperialism elicited a considerable number of poetic responses. However, albeit with very few exceptions such as the jubilee ode penned by Tennyson, the then Poet Laureate, these texts have been typically overlooked in literary and historical research alike. Situated at the intersection of literary studies and British imperial history, this paper will primarily look at poems written for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, which I will compare and contrast with the arguably even more neglected poetic output inspired by George III’s Jubilee. In my discussion of the interrelation between space and time in a selection of mostly forgotten texts, I aim to highlight the role played by territorial expansion in the ideological construction of historical progressivism. Reading royal jubilee poems from roughly the opposite ends of the century, I will also seek to chart significant continuities and discontinuities in their various authors’ attitudes towards the British monarchy and Empire, thus contributing to painting a more nuanced picture of the development of imperialist discourse in nineteenth-century British poetry