It’s easy to forget that Brunel could get things wrong. The Great Eastern was too big, too clumsy, too complex. Then there was his doomed “atmospheric railway” - a method of pneumatic locomotive propulsion that could never work reliably, even with 21st century materials. If only Brunel had got together with another great early Victorian figure, the scientist and discoverer of electro-magnetism Michael Faraday, we might all be travelling today on magnetic levitation trains instead of rolling along on glorified tramways. But that’s not the point. The point is that while nobody liked it when Brunel made big expensive mistakes, in a curious way he was allowed - even expected - to do so. That, if anything, is the main difference between the Victorian age and our own: they had the confidence to back a hunch. So the Tay Bridge collapsed, but that led to the masterly if over-engineered Forth Bridge. Neither was by Brunel. This was a society where an engineer could be, as he was, a hero: but he was only one of many brilliant and often flawed designers. Today, if we so much as build a pedestrian bridge that wobbles slightly, the blame culture goes into overdrive.

Here is a list of some Victorian things that are fully relevant at the start of the 21st century. The telephone. Electric light. The cinema. Recorded music. Photography. Darwin’s theory of Evolution. The Royal Mail - in particular the pillar box, invented by civil servant-turned novelist Anthony Trollope. High-speed trains. Underground railways. Bicycles. Propellor-driven ships. Saturation advertising. Christmas as we know it. Public libraries. Free schooling. Good hospitals. Women graduates. X-rays. Rugby. Soccer as a national sport. Holidays.

And here are some more. Animal welfare. Social realist drama, ushered in by George Bernard Shaw. Public lavatories. Publicly outed celebs (Oscar Wilde). Popular newspapers. Computer keyboards, derived from typewriters. Machine guns. Torpedoes. Dodgy arms deals. Synthetic dyes. Antiseptic. Escalators. Trades unions. Giant botanical glasshouses. Convenience foods, in cans and packets. Prefabricated buildings. National art galleries. Social housing. Refugee crises. Sudden epidemics. Financial panics. Garden suburbs. Abused children. Public parks. Motor cars. Aircraft.

Aircraft? Well, they tried. One of the exhibits in the V&A’s “Victorian Visions” is a surprisingly large propeller from Hiram Maxim’s steam-driven aeroplane of 1894. It did succeed in lurching off the ground, broke through the guard rail that was meant to stop it rising too high, and swiftly crashed. Not quite a flight, then, but if Maxim had not then abandoned it, we might have beaten the Wright brothers by a few years. Still, if you go to the venerable fairground of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, you will find an original ride he designed, still in use: “Sir Hiram Maxim’s Flying Machines”. But Maxim, an American turned Brit in 1900, had other strings to his bow. Had he not invented the rapid-firing Maxim machine gun in Britain in 1884 (and this is the object that ushers you out of the V&A show) the course of the Great War might have been rather different. The British Army soon found itself facing arms-traded Maxim guns on the North-West Frontier: the Boer War certainly proved its effectiveness. It somehow seems fitting that Maxim died in 1916, the year of the Somme offensive - albeit of old age.