Free for your perusal until the end of July.
Queen Victoria’s Journals – Home Page
The interface is whack, but start browsing–almost at random–and you’ll find some startling and wonderful passages. To wit, this lil bit from page one of volume one, recounting one moment from Victoria’s 1832 journey to Wales via carriage:
It rains very hard. We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate ever where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
This is the world that even the *richest little girl in all of the British Empire* saw and found remarkable, but by no means shocking or foreign. If you’re writing steampunk and this isn’t in there, then you’re doing it wrong.