NARRATOR: Welcome to the gallery of nineteenth-century decorative arts, a bridge between the old world… and the new. The British Empire was never larger, wealthier, or more powerful than it was at this moment. Why? Queen Victoria championed Britain’s imperial might not just in politics, but in industrial innovation – with an enormous impact on taste-making and design, as you’ll see in this gallery.

The case behind you holds medals of her likeness. The largest medal was cast to honor her Jubilee—recognizing her fiftieth year as monarch of the Empire, at the time, the longest in history.

While fashion, art, and excess flourished at home, greed and violence marked dealings abroad. With her blessing, the British East India Company, powerful in trade and politics, imposed control over India, despite wave after wave of bloody rebellions and calls for liberation. She wrote in her letters (in the third person, of course):

QUEEN VICTORIA: The Queen has long been of opinion … that it will be good policy to oblige the East India Company to keep permanently a larger portion of the Royal Army in India than heretofore. The Empire has nearly doubled itself within the last twenty years, and the Queen's troops have been kept at the old establishment. They are the body on whom the maintenance of that Empire depends.

NARRATOR: In the case against the wall, you will find a naïve ceramic figure of a tiger mauling a British soldier. “The Death of Munro” was based on a popular news story some years earlier. This inexpensive depiction, produced in Staffordshire, was designed for a middle-class British mantel. But in India, a similar object told this same story in strongly anti-imperial tones. An enormous automaton called “Tipu’s Tiger” was created for the Tipu Sultan, a metaphor for violent uprising and rebellion against a foreign invader.