A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain: Chapter 1

By virtue of her long reign over what was then the world’s wealthiest, most powerful and influential nation, it was inevitable that Victoria would give her name to the era in which she lived.

Some in government circles felt that both her names sounded too unEnglish, and debated whether, at her coronation, she should adopt the name Charlotte or Elizabeth.

Her voice was much complimented. Lady Lyttelton, who saw her prorogue Parliament in 1839, remembered that it was: ‘quite that of a child, a gushing sort of richness with the most sensible, cultivated and gentleman-like accent and emphasis’.

The aristocracy – amoral, hedonistic and anti-intellectual – resented his earnest and puritanical nature (even his wife was irritated by his habit of retiring to bed early: if required to stay up late, he might fall asleep in his chair).

The fact that her subjects could read about her summer holidays and family picnics was symptomatic of the monarchy as it had developed under Victoria. Previously, the private life of the Royal Family had been a subject for scurrilous mockery. Depictions of it in popular prints had been disrespectful and often vicious. Now the monarch and her consort were a model of respectability whose example the public were encouraged to follow.

She could easily have been mistaken for the wife of a bourgeois Englishman, and this too enabled her subjects to identify with her.

Among other things, he had the Cambridge curriculum modernized, rescuing the university from a state of moribund complacency and putting it on a par with those on the Continent.

She had always cherished loyal servants, and Brown was solicitous and efficient.

Benjamin Disraeli, who briefly became premier in 1868, was a florid and effusive personality, more theatrical than political.

This title [Empress of India], which she adopted as of 1 January 1877, had been considered absurdly pompous and foreign-sounding, both unsuited to and unnecessary for a British monarch.

When in 1885 General Gordon died at Khartoum because Gladstone’s government had dithered and delayed too long before sending a relief expedition, she was incandescent with anger and administered a blistering rebuke: ‘To think all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’

Yet its implication that she was a priggish and humourless matron is entirely inaccurate, and her journals bear witness that, on many occasions, she was ‘Very Much Amused’ or even ‘Very Much Amused Indeed’.

A modern biographer, Giles St Aubyn, has written that: ‘Never before had an English sovereign proved so assiduous a correspondent, or so dedicated a bureaucrat. During the course of her reign she wrote, on average, two and a half thousand words a day.’

Throughout the three decades between the nadir of her fortunes in 1871 and her death, Victoria’s popularity increased.

By no act of her own, but merely by the course of events, the virtue of age, and the glamour of a long reign with the splendid finish of a double jubilee, she became the tutelary deity of the whole nation, and died in an odour of sanctity unapproached by any previous British monarch since the Norman conquest.