Description
2021 year marks the 120th anniversary of the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901. Her long reign was a remarkable age of innovation, scientific enquiry and social development, and this set brings together two icons of that age.
Firstly, it includes the VERY last gold sovereign of her reign, a 1901 sovereign minted at the Royal Mint in London. The gold sovereign is an icon of the Victorian Era because it had become the pre-eminent gold trade coin in the world, due in no small part to the fact that almost a quarter of the world’s population used it as currency!
To this gold sovereign we add one of the most highly sought after stamps in the world – the Penny Black of 1840. This is the world’s first adhesive postage stamp and it revolutionised the way people communicated forever: so much so, that this Victorian innovation is still in use today! The Penny Black is not only an important first, it is rare too – it was issued for less than a year, from May 1840 to February 1841, just 10 months. The stamp in this set is a very high quality collector version which, although it is used, it has all four margins around the outer edge of it, one of the ways collectors differentiate the quality.
These two icons of the Victorian era are fascinating individually, and even more interesting as a set. One is a gold coin, minted right in London, that would have circulated throughout much of the world at the time. The other is a stamp that made it easier for people to write to each other across a city, or across the globe. The set is housed in a presentation case with an informative certificate.
