FeaturesHistory

Victoria on Victoria: The Self-Portrait Sketch of 1835

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10th April 2019
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 the same exactness of observation to herself. It is, of course, however, not the only self-portrait that she made. The date…
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'Ever your loving Nicky': A forgotten letter?

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25th March 2019
I first encountered this hitherto neglected and virtually ‘forgotten’ letter, categorised as by Tsar Nicholas II, within the volume The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra April 1914-March 1917, skilfully edited by Prof Joseph T. Fuhrmann. What immediately caught my interest was the fact that it was contained within the main body of the work, ‘The…
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Poetry and the Tsarina?

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27th February 2019
Included amongst the works read as a young woman by Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918), were – according to letters that she wrote to her eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg – Guizot’s Reformation de la Litterature, the Life of Cromwell and Raumer’s nine-volume set, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen(Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden…
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Returning to England with Victoria

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28th January 2019
The Duke of Kent was determined that his unborn child – history’s Queen Victoria – should not be born outside of Britain, to assure its right to succeed to the throne in the British mind. As a true Hanoverian, he was the fourth son of George III, the King who famously ‘glor[ied] in the name of Britain’. Clearly, it was a step forward from the reign of George I, who knew only faulty…
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