Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

О книге

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.

Автор

Matthew Dennison

#Биографии и мемуары #История

Читать Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions онлайн беплатно

Шрифт

Интервал

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

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

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

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

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.’^>1 Remove the horses and Greville’s picture is recognisable to the modern reader familiar with London in the grip of royal fervour. The Times attempted to unravel the attitude of Greville’s ‘mob’: ‘They thought of [Victoria] not as an individual to be loved with headlong zeal or played upon by corrupt adulation … they regarded her as in herself an institution.’^>2 Victoria’s success over the course of a long reign was to unite, to the benefit of both, the individual and the institution. In a very personal sense, the monarchy became ‘Victorian’: in the minds of many of Victoria’s subjects, the throne acquired what they understood as her own virtues. This symbiosis invested the British Crown with a tangibly human aspect at the same time as exalting Victoria herself as an archetype and exemplar of all that was laudable in a woman and a ruler. It was partly good fortune, partly born of a sympathetic popular mindset shaped by culture and economics. As we shall see, Victoria’s behaviour did not consistently merit approbation, which, throughout her final decades and beyond, came close to idolatry.

Hers did not begin as a cult of personality: that happened later. From infancy those closest to her schooled her in a course of exemplary behaviour: her mother, her governess, her canny Uncle Leopold. A backlash against the burlesque and buffoonery of her immediate predecessors, their model of rectitude encouraged a suppression of self in the interests of a tarnished Crown. Outwardly, Victoria’s monarchy came to be characterised by probity, continence and earnestness, all ‘Victorianisms’ derided by posterity. Yet this mandate of good behaviour provided an imprimatur of some resilience for a throne that, in political terms, continued to lose ground to an increasingly elected and representative Parliament. If Victoria did not always keep faith with that mandate, she mostly avoided publishing her transgressions. Returning to the fray at the time of her death,

Продолжить чтение

Вам будет интересно