Pakistan, Oct. 10 -- When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 at the age of eighteen, few could have predicted that her name would come to define an entire age. Over a reign of sixty-three years, she presided over the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of a global empire, and a transformation in how the British understood family, duty, and respectability. The word "Victorian" is still shorthand for restraint, propriety, and moral seriousness. Yet the woman behind the label was far more complicated than the label suggests. Was she the empire's moral compass during a period of dizzying change, or a monarch who cared more about her reputation than her subjects? Putting Victoria on trial means weighing both the image she cultivated a...