Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Victorian era ran from the 20th of June 1837, when Queen Victoria acceded to the throne following the death of her uncle William IV, until her death on the 22nd of January 1901. Her reign lasted 63 years and seven months, longer than any of her predecessors.
Three Reform Acts expanded the electoral franchise: the Reform Act of 1832, the Second Reform Act of 1867, and the Third Reform Act of 1884, which introduced the general principle of one vote per household. Historian Bruce L. Kinzer describes these acts as placing the United Kingdom on the path toward becoming a democracy, though all women and a large minority of men remained excluded into the early twentieth century.
Children worked in factories, mines, and a range of other occupations. Employers preferred them because they were cheap, could not easily resist harsh conditions, and could fit into small spaces. The Factory Act of 1833 began requiring part-time education for child labourers, but compulsory school attendance did not take hold until the 1870s and 1880s.
Overcrowding was extreme, with seven or eight people frequently sharing a single room. Of babies born in Liverpool in 1851, only 45 per cent survived to age 20. By the 1890s, nearly 10 per cent of the urban population lacked enough food to maintain basic physical functions, and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was deliberately designed to punish the poor rather than assist them.
William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone invented the first telegraph system in 1837. An American patented the telephone in 1876, and a little over a decade later 26,000 telephones were in service in Britain. Guglielmo Marconi developed early radio broadcasting before the era ended.
Women had limited legal rights across most areas of life, and a feminist movement developed in response. Between the 1860s and 1880s, women suspected of prostitution were subject to compulsory examinations for sexually transmitted infections, a policy that provoked some of the earliest organised feminist campaigning. The age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 following the white slavery scandal.