The Victoria Letters: The official companion to the ITV Victoria series
The official companion to ITV’s hotly anticipated new drama, The Victoria Letters delves into the private writings of the young Queen Victoria, painting a vivid picture of the personal life of one of England’s greatest monarchs.From the producers of Poldark and Endeavour, ITV’s Victoria follows the early years of the young Queen’s reign, based closely on Victoria’s own letters and journals. Now explore this extensive collection in greater depth, and discover who Victoria really was behind her upright public persona.At only 18 years old, Victoria ascended the throne as a rebellious teenager and gradually grew to become one of the most memorable, unshakeable and powerful women in history. The extensive writings she left behind document this personal journey and show how she triumphed over scandal and corruption. Written by Internationally bestselling author, historian of 12 books and Victoria historical consultant, Helen Rappaport, and including a foreword by Daisy Goodwin – acclaimed novelist and screenwriter of the series – The Victoria Letters details the history behind the show. Revealing Victoria’s own thoughts about the love interests, family dramas and court scandals during her early reign, it also delves into the running of the royal household, the upstairs-downstairs relationships, and what it was like to live in Victorian England.Full of beautiful photography from the series and genuine imagery from the era, come behind the palace doors and discover the girl behind the Queen.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
FIRST EDITION
Text © Helen Rappaport 2016
A Mammoth Screen/Masterpiece Co-production for ITV
Television series, photographs and ‘Victoria’ logo © Mammoth Screen Limited 2016. All rights reserved.
Victoria series photography by Gareth Gatrell
Cover photography © Billy & Hells
All other images © see here
Design © Smith & Gilmore
All quotes in grey text featured at bottom of pages are taken from the fictional Victoria television scripts written by Daisy Goodwin.
All interviews with cast and crew supplied by Alison Maloney, with the exception of those with Daisy Goodwin, which were supplied by Helen Rappaport.
Transcripts of Victoria’s journals, containing all original stress and emphasis, can be found at
www.queenvictoriasjournals.org
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
With thanks to Patrick Smith
Helen Rappaport asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008196837
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008196844
Version: 2016-09-17
BY DAISY GOODWIN
WHO WAS QUEEN VICTORIA? The image most of us have is of an old lady in a bonnet dressed in black, the woman who is immortalised in countless statues all over the country. Until this year, she was our longest reigning monarch, coming to the throne in 1837 when she was eighteen and reigning for sixty-three years until her death in 1901. Photography was invented in the early years of her reign, but the first images of Victoria and her husband Albert were taken in the 1850s, when Victoria was already a mother of nine, so we have no photographic record of the young Victoria, the teenager who on the morning of 20 June 1837 woke up to find that she was the queen of the most powerful country in the world. But we do have records of her diaries, which have left behind an indelibly vivid picture of the passionate strong-willed girl. Here she is writing about Albert shortly after their engagement, ‘I just saw my dearest Albert in his white cashmere breeches, with nothing on underneath!’, or after their first parting, ‘Oh how I love him, how intensely, how devotedly, how ardently! I cried and felt so sad. Wrote my journal. Walked. Cried.’
I first came across Victoria’s journals when I was at university studying nineteenth-century England, and I was immediately taken by the girl that sprang out of the pages. Many years later when I had a teenage daughter of my own, I had a row with her one morning and it suddenly struck me that she was pretty much the same age and size (five foot nothing) as Victoria when she became Queen, and then I thought, what would happen if she woke up one morning and found that she was the most famous woman in the world? From that moment on I started writing scenes in my head, and the idea for Victoria the TV series was born.
From the beginning I wanted to show Victoria as a girl who had to do her growing up in public. Most of us get to make our adolescent mistakes in private but Victoria had to do everything under the scrutiny of her courtiers, the press and the public. There were no royal spin doctors in those days, and when Victoria made mistakes, and she made some serious ones in the early years of her reign, there was no press office to hide behind. There were plenty of people who thought that an 18-year-old girl could not be an effective monarch.
But it is clear when you read Victoria’s own words that she was a woman with an extraordinary sense of her own identity. Despite having every aspect of her early life controlled by her mother and her mother’s advisor Sir John Conroy, Victoria was not moulded by them. From the moment she came to the throne she was determined to do things her way. To take one example, as a baby she had been christened Alexandrina Victoria after her godfather, Alexander of Russia, and her mother Victorine; as a little girl she was called Drina by her mother and her governess Lehzen. But on her accession she decided that instead of taking a ‘queenly’ name like Mary or Elizabeth, she wanted to be called Queen Victoria – this was shocking at the time because the name Victoria was completely new, but Victoria, my heroine, knew instinctively that it was the right name for her. In that sense at least, she created the Victorian age.
