Appropriately enough, we have an exhibition to examine these and many other such paradoxes. Appropriate because the Victorians loved a good exhibition - they invented the idea of the world’s fair or Expo at the Great Exhibition of 1851 - and because “Inventing New Britain: The Victorian Vision”, opening on April 5, is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, founded in homage to the eponymous golden couple. The first half of that title is right. The second half is open to challenge. Yes, they invented modern Britain. But there was no real overall Victorian vision. Beyond that re-branding of the royal family, nobody wrote the script for it, you can’t really say that this was a manifesto-driven time. Those involved with making Victorian Britain and Empire were carried along with it, made the most of it, or fell by the wayside.

Of those that made it to the top, did Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Alexander Graham Bell or the prolific inventor Hiram Maxim have visions? Well, of course: visions of technocratic advancement, of communications, of speed, of state-of-the-art weaponry . Did John Ruskin or William Morris, tastemakers, or Augustus Welby Northmoor Pugin, architect, or the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of artists, have visions? Most certainly: they were the moving force behind the return to medievalism. Did Prince Albert have a vision? Oh yes, of the creative union of the arts and the sciences: hence the Great Exhibition, hence the subsequent building of the South Kensington cultural district still sometimes known as “Albertopolis”.

As for politics, the government of the day veered between Whig and Tory, Gladstone and Disraeli, and so did Victoria’s own convictions. Necessary reforms were introduced by both sides. So plenty of people had visions, if by that you mean firm goals. Florence Nightingale most certainly had aims she fulfilled brilliantly in her transformation of health care. But did plump little Victoria, the carefree party girl turned careworn prematurely widowed head of a global superpower, have a vision? Not on that level. She did her duty, she took advice, she mourned and sulked and worried about the way things were going, but no-one could ever accuse Victoria of having an agenda, let alone a vision. She just happened to be there for a very long time. She reacted to events, more or less. She didn’t drive the Victorian juggernaut: you can’t, when you’re the deity being carried.

How else to get a fix on the Victorian thing? Wars are perhaps more useful historical bookends. One way of looking at the Victorian period is to ignore the official dates (succeeded to the throne, 1837, died 1901) and instead consider the whole interval between two mighty conflicts: the Napoleonic wars and the Great War. That gives you a century, near enough, from 1815 to 1914. From the economic boom and dandified ruling class of the Regency period in which Victoria grew up, to the no less flourishing and differently dandified Edwardian period when her tearaway son Bertie briefly held the throne and women took to bloomers and rode bicycles. And in between? The time of stern resolve, so we have been led to believe. The time of dark frock-coats and mutton-chop whiskers and stovepipe hats and those curious hooped dresses known as crinolines which turned women into proto-Daleks. The two key photographic images of the period are the unsmiling Queen in black, and the scarcely-concealed swagger of mud-splashed Brunel, chewing on his cigar amid the titanic chains of the “Great Eastern” shipyard.