The monument featuring only two women among its fifty-three Victorian figures

Queen Victoria stands over Dalton Square looking a little pensively over the square. She is the centerpiece of a massive Portland stone and bronze monument designed by Herbert Hampton in 1906. It was commissioned and paid for by James Williamson, 1st Baron Ashton.

But look closer at the faces. The plinth features a bronze frieze of fifty-three prominent British figures from the Victorian age. It is a bit of a mixed bag of worthies, as the critic Nikolaus Pevsner put it. You have the giants of science like Darwin and Lister, the novelists like Dickens and George Eliot, and a long line of Prime Ministers.

Out of those fifty-three figures, only two are women: George Eliot and Florence Nightingale. Local folks have their own nicknames for it too. If you catch it at just the right angle against the western sky at dusk, the silhouette looks like a man. They call it King Victoria. In a world of bronze and stone, even a Queen can be mistaken for a King when the light hits her just right.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons