Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
Matthew Dennison

A fresh, witty, accessible life of Queen Victoria. Not since Lytton Strachey has the irony, contradictions and influence of this Queen been treated with such flourish or biographical insight.'Queen Victoria had a very complicated and psychologically fascinating personality and only a very talented biographer could get to the key of her character. Fortunately in Matthew Dennison's pithy, well-researched, beautifully written and very accessible book, she has found one' Andrew RobertsQueen Victoria is Britain’s queen of contradictions. In her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast; cultural imperialism and imperial compassion; fear of intellectualism and excitement at technology; romanticism and prudishness, she became a spirit of the age to which she gave her name.Victoria embraced photography, railway travel and modern art; she resisted compulsory education for the working classes, recommended for a leading women’s rights campaigner ‘a good whipping’ and detested smoking. She may or may not have been amused.Meanwhile she reinvented the monarchy and wrestled with personal reinvention. She lived in the shadow of her mother and then under the tutelage of her husband; finally she embraced self-reliance during her long widowhood. Fresh, witty and accessible, Queen Victoria is a compelling assessment of Victoria’s mercurial character and impact, written with the irony, flourish and insight that this Queen and her rule so richly deserve.

For Gráinne and Aeneas, with all love

‘I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly: ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

‘Elizabeth [I] was a great Queen but a bad woman; and even in her royal capacity she erred sometimes; she had a very great idea of her prerogative and was more arbitrary even than her tyrannical father.’

Princess Victoria, c.1834

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE (#u76b188f5-8d64-5bfd-9308-c12a75628877)

DEDICATION (#uffd34307-6029-55cf-8f77-ab46719d8baf)

EPIGRAPH (#uaef44f09-bb72-58ea-962e-cb8b7b61fea3)

QUEEN VICTORIA’S FAMILY TREE: A SIMPLIFIED VERSION (#u55ae3a87-5407-56f4-a3d5-72d0e514c0c3)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ue835e41e-5c01-5ccb-ac16-a566f2f3e727)

INTRODUCTION (#u41f7438f-0e14-5523-ad7e-2a2fbc4cc0e5)

CHAPTER 1: ‘Pocket Hercules’ (#udfb28a57-3a2a-596b-8ca0-7bf7ffdc1146)

CHAPTER 2: ‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’ (#uc217cd59-9673-5db6-aad9-405a2fcb52b2)

CHAPTER 3: ‘Constant amusements, flattery, excitements and mere politics’ (#udd413cb3-2c1d-5bc8-9685-54a11fa9776b)

CHAPTER 4: ‘Every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 5: ‘The cares of Royalty pressed comparatively lightly’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 6: ‘The pain of parting’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 7: ‘Unavailing regrets’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 8: ‘A Highland Widow’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 9: ‘Wisest counsellors’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 10: ‘Mother of many nations’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 11: ‘All that magnificence’ (#litres_trial_promo)

PICTURE SECTION (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY MATTHEW DENNISON (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 (#litres_trial_promo). Victoria, Duchess of Kent with Princess Victoria by Sir William Beechey, 1821 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

2 (#litres_trial_promo). Victoria Regina by Henry Tanworth Wells, 1887 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

3 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria by Sir Francis Grant, 1843 (The Crown Estate / The Bridgeman Art Library)

4 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria by Alfred Edward Chalon, 1838 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland / The Bridgeman Art Library)

5 (#litres_trial_promo). Lord Melbourne with Queen Victoria’s dog, Islay, by Queen Victoria (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

6 (#litres_trial_promo). Prince Albert by Emil Wolff, 1844 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

7 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842 by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1842–6 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

8 (#litres_trial_promo). To the Queen’s Private Apartments, English School, 19th century (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

9 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria with her Four Eldest Children by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1845 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

10 (#litres_trial_promo). Badge of the Order of Victoria and Albert by Tommaso Saulini, c.1863 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

11 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria, Alice and Louise with portrait of Albert, 1863 (© Hulton Royals Collection / Getty Images)

12 (#litres_trial_promo). Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866 by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1867 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

13 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria with a spinning wheel, 1875 (© Hulton Royals Collection / Getty Images)

14 (#litres_trial_promo).The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887 by Laurits Regner Tuxen, 1887 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

15 (#litres_trial_promo). Queen Victoria by Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant, 1899 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

Introduction

ON THE EVE of Queen Victoria’s coronation, in June 1838, Charles Greville committed to his diary a memorable description of the capital. ‘It is as if the population had been on a sudden quintupled; the uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise, are indescribable. Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled … not a mob here and there but the town all mob … the park one vast encampment … and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.’