Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine. Queen Victoria and title on the front board.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

This is a book written through religious eyes (at the height of the British Empire) to reflect the patriotic jingoism of this time.

Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days is known as the Victorian era and was longer than any of her predecessors. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India.

Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After the deaths of her father and grandfather in 1820, she was raised under close supervision by her mother and her comptroller, John Conroy. She inherited the throne aged 18 after her father’s three elder brothers died without surviving legitimate issue. Victoria, a constitutional monarch, attempted privately to influence government policy and ministerial appointments; publicly, she became a national icon who was identified with strict standards of personal morality.

Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. Their nine children married into royal and noble families across the continent, earning Victoria the sobriquet “the grandmother of Europe”. After Albert’s death in 1861, Victoria plunged into deep mourning and avoided public appearances. As a result of her seclusion, British republicanism temporarily gained strength, but in the latter half of her reign, her popularity recovered. Her Golden and Diamond jubilees were times of public celebration. Victoria died in 1901 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, at the age of 81. The last British monarch of the House of Hanover, she was succeeded by her son Edward VII of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Godfrey Holden Pike was born in Stoke Newington, Middlesex, England in June 1836, the son of Godfrey Theophilus and Ann Ward Pike. Having met C. H. Spurgeon a few years previously, in 1872 Pike was appointed sub-editor of Spurgeon’s magazine The Sword and the Trowel, a post he was to hold for the next twenty years. He contributed numerous articles to the magazine, as well as writing several historical and biographical works on evangelical topics between 1870 and 1904. Some of his titles include: Ancient Meeting Houses, The Metropolitan Tabernacle, Victoria: Queen And Empress, Beneath the Blue Sky, The Life and Work of Archibald G. Brown – Preacher and Philanthropist, Oliver Cromwell and His Times, From Slave to College President, and Wesley and His Preachers.

Having been closely associated with Spurgeon for about thirty years, Pike was eminently suited to write The Life and Work of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, which first appeared in six volumes in 1894. It was reprinted by the Trust, in two volumes, in 1991.

G. Holden Pike and his wife Ellen had three children – Godfrey Holden, Oliver Gregory, and Lucy Ellen. Pike died in Edmonton, Middlesex towards the end of 1910.

Spurgeon’s magazine The Sword and the Trowel” – ‘Our magazine is intended to report the efforts of those Churches and Associations, which are more or less intimately connected with the Lord’s work at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and to advocate those views of doctrine and Church order which are most certainly received among us