The key was to be active in the pursuit of progress: the greatest Victorian sin was idleness. As the 15-year-old Victoria, heir presumptive to the throne, virtuously wrote in her diary on the 27 January 1835: ‘I love to be employed; I hate to be idle.’
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Elena Mary, a postdoctoral associate member in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, a historian of culture, class and the female body in modern Britain.
