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137 VICTORIA, Queen. Fores’ correct representation of the State Procession on the occasion of the august ceremony of Her Majesty’s Coronation, June 28th, 1838. London: Published by Messrs. Fores (imprint overlaid with Rudolph Ackermann’s ticket), 1838 “the provision of public spectacle for the masses in the new democratic age”
First edition of this uncommon, highly attractive and genuinely impressive 60-foot-long panorama, here complete and in the preferred coloured issue, offering the purchaser the opportunity to bring into the parlour the glint and shimmer of Victoria’s coronation procession and exemplifying “the way the experience of the monarchy was invariably an experience of the media through which it was communicated” (Plunkett, p. 68). Historian Sir Roy Strong writes: “The procession from the palace through the London streets was an innovation now that the one on foot from Westminster Hall to the Abbey had been abolished. This would prove to be the seed for everything that was to follow, the provision of public spectacle for the masses in the new democratic age. For the first time, what we now know as the Coronation Coach, the state coach of George III, was used to bear the sovereign to the Abbey . . . by 1838 the Reform Bill had been passed and Lord Melbourne’s eye would have been on the wider public and, as a consequence, the procession was deliberately developed, its route extended and an extra £26,000 assigned to it. The aim, according to The Mirror , was ‘to gratify a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the metropolis’ and, as Charles Greville also commented, ‘to amuse and interest them seems to have been the principal object’. By that date too processions were made easier by the advent of the new macadam road surfaces which enabled coaches to whiz along at nine miles per hour. Victoria’s procession included the Lifeguards, the foreign residents, two bands of the Household Brigade, carriages bearing members of the royal family and household, besides a
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