Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The question is a complex and fascinating one to answer.
In the immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth century, and the age was accordingly named after her. It begs then the further question of what a Victorian was if Queen Victoria wasn’t one, as well as…
The name of Miss M. Hope Robson belongs to that both visible and invisible host of British royal nannies and governesses which appeared at the royal courts of Europe in the nineteenth century, known to their charges but in some cases, almost forgotten to biography.
Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet will be on permanent display this year at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, as part of the museum’s 2019 bicentenary celebration to mark the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, to whom of course, the…
In the summer of 1878, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, came to Eastbourne, because she had been ordered rest. The sojourn on the East Sussex coast was the gift of Queen Victoria to her daughter, (David Duff, Hessian Tapestry, 177) and Alice visited the seaside town with her family in what would poignantly prove to be the last holiday that they would…
Queen Victoria’s love of Scotland and the Scottish Highlands is of course, legendary – immortalised in a wealth of artworks, souvenir albums, including the Queen’s own watercolours and not least of course, the Queen’s Highland journals. She praised…
But for the moving memorial that Queen Victoria erected to her and for a letter in which this is described, the name of Ida Bonanomi might have been completely forgotten in historical terms. Thanks to these, this is not the case.
It can be found in Edinburgh’s Rosebank…
An exquisite gold, sapphire and diamond brooch crafted in St Petersburg was consigned to auction in October 2018. I had first encountered it as a personal gift from Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) to the friend of her youth, Marion Louisa ‘Pollie’ Delmé-Radcliffe, Baroness Ungern-Sternberg whose touching connection I explored in a short article for my Royal Central blog back in…
In a recent life of Queen Victoria, (A. N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life, 2014) I stumbled across an illustration of one of the famous group photographs taken behind the Palais Edinburg in Coburg, showing Queen Victoria surrounded by a whole host of contemporary royalty –…
Aged sixteen, Princess Victoria made a pencil sketch of herself. Knowing the vividness of the watercolours that she made for her sketchbook and the skilled drawings she made during this time of other important figures in her youth, it is fascinating that she chose to apply…
Whilst researching for a forthcoming academic article on Louisa Louis, the devoted dresser to Princess Charlotte of Wales (1771-1838) who was deeply valued by Queen Victoria, I encountered the name of Mrs Brock. She belongs to that fascinating roll-call of characters that claim a connection with Queen Victoria, who have become all-but historically invisible and are normally banished to the realms…
