The best of times, the worst of times. Nineteen years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain’s vaunted Navy was mauled by the German High Seas Fleet at the 1916 Battle of Jutland. At right is the British battle cruiser Invincible. She wasn’t.

And so, as of last night, neither are we. Neither am I. In my self-doubt—was everything I taught about America for over thirty years a lie?—I needed to turn to a constitutional monarchy to tamp down, if only in shallow ground, my fear for the loss of our republic. I turned, specifically, the this Shelley poem.

Shelley’s poem reminds me a bit of Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Both men beat the hell out of you, only to let you off the hook with the faintest of hope at the ends of their respective literary landmarks. Edwards—after some of his Puritan parishioners had fainted in the pews out of abject terror—held up the reputation of a loving God. Shelley’s more nebulous, with his “glorious Phantom.” It’s a thinner sliver of hope than God is.

Shelley was a Romantic, but he was in this case an accurate political analyst. George III, having lost America, was dotty, slipping in and out of bouts with insanity that were made worse by treatments that neither a king nor a commoner deserved. His pinch-hitter was the Prince Regent, George IV on Papa’s death, who lacked morals and wisdom and common decency. With the locomotive being invented in his time, George IV was definitely a train wreck. He was, a shipwreck, too.

And finally, way down here in the essay, is my thesis: England was saved, after 1819, by a stunning series of reforms that transformed a plutocracy into something approaching democracy and likewise transformed the kind of soulless capitalism, evoked so passionately by Dickens, into an economy that—finally and reluctantly—recognized the working class as human beings.

It was not a straight path. The president-elect has theatened to turn the military loose on protestors. The British government did just that. In Manchester’s St. Peter’s Square in 1819, British cavalry charged into a crowd of working-class protesters who had the audacity to demandy parity in Parliament for urban boroughs vs. rural boroughs, dominated by the immense power of the landed aristocracy. About a dozen were killed; 400 were injured.

England would continue with the kind of xenophobia that marks successful modern American politics.

Theirs was deadly, too: A million Irish died in their Famine while grain harvested in Ireland was sent to England; the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 India would be crowned by lashing suspected ringleaders to the muzzles of cannons, which were then fired. And, of course, Britain would join in the plunder of Africa, the European competition there tempered—so fierce that it threatened war among White people on the Continent— finally, by the Congress of Berlin in 1885. In the interlude, Britain used Indian poppies to win over the Chinese, who became addicted to opium, and then fought two wars to force their trade conditions on the devastated nation. It was the Art of the Deal.

So Britain struggled and inflicted great cruelty. But along the way, as the power of the monarchy began to ebb and pass to Parliament (It’s notable that Article One in our Constitution is devoted to Congress). For Victorian England, this meant a kind of golden age of power and prosperity—named for a queen who thought it unwise Royal Navy sailors to grow beards–in which there was painful, incremental, but important progress.

I’m not suggesting that we are entering a similar age of reform. We are in for hard times.

Trump, born at the onset of the Boomer Generation, is the final prank we—pampered and indulged as children— have to play on the generations after us, who deserve so much better from us.

The next four years will be especially hard on women, as they were on British women in Victoria’s time, in the age of the Ripper murders, of women being banished from the industrial workforce to become the Ripper’s prey, of suffragists being force-fed in prison, a harrowing version of rape, of Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself in front of a horse at The Derby to show how ready women were to sacrifice themselves for the right to vote, of middle-class widows, required to wear, in mourning, black crepe—they went up in flames in an age when gas jets lit up middle-class homes—and of young women shell-fillers in World War I factories, called “canaries” because of the TNT poisoning that turned their skin bright yellow. TNT would sterilize some and kill others.

Women will suffer, now as they did in Victorian (and Edwardian) England. I do not know where American women are headed. I only know that I want to be there with them. I want to be there, too, with Dreamers, with union workers, with journalists, with teachers, with clergy.

Mary Travers, gone 15 years now, sings here, more cogently and more brilliantly, with Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, everything that I mean to say here.