Lurking beneath the high-grade colloquia is an assumption that it is on a hiding to nothing: that there were several Victorian ages, while the aftershocks could be detected well into the 1960s.

H.G. Wells once remarked that, when Queen Victoria died, the effect was as if a paperweight had been removed from people’s minds, allowing everything hidden inside to float out into the ether. Henry James, invoked by presenter Matthew Sweet at the start of this entertaining hour long discussion, described the mourners at Her Majesty’s funeral as “motherless”. The thought of a decades-long era of constraint and repression was enhanced by Sweet’s decision to ask his five panellists to come up with words or phrases that they reckoned pertinent to the topic set before them.

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