the queen
a very hard worker
dictating letters
holding court
reading her mail
a vast deal of work
while the housemaids of empire
toil away
Combines a fragment of T. Woolner's The Housemaid, cut from the 1893 edition of Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture, with Tom Thomson's Tamaracks (1916), a fragment of an antique map of southern Ontario, and advertisements and textual fragments from The Dominion Illustrated, 1889.
The story
The housemaid is from Thomas Woolner's The Housemaid, as reproduced in the 1893 volume of Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture. Woolner (1825–1892) was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its only sculptor.
Behind her are Tom Thomson's Tamaracks (1916), part of an antique map of southern Ontario, and advertisements and printed fragments from The Dominion Illustrated of 1889. By that year Victoria had been on the throne for more than fifty years, and the Golden Jubilee of 1887 was two years behind her.