HistoryInsight

Queen Victoria's earliest memories

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6th June 2019
The earliest memories of a historical personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially, what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as they saw them. Of course, we know that all true biography begins before birth and that event could hardly be expected to count amongst any of even the very…
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History

From Scotland with love: Queen Victoria

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3rd June 2019
Queen Victoria’s visited Balmoral in her beloved Scottish Highlands in the late autumn of 1900. The Queen could not know it, but it was the last time that she would see the new castle which Prince Albert had erected in her words as his ‘own work… as at Osborne’ and…
HistoryInsight

Was Queen Victoria a Victorian?

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31st May 2019
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…
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History

Revisiting the birth of Queen Victoria

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24th May 2019
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born whose birth would be of overwhelming importance but on whose delivery it was by no means certain that she would succeed. This, despite the proud boast of her father, the Duke of Kent, who was determined in the royal marriage race that ensued on the death of the Prince Regent’s heir, Princess Charlotte, that ‘the crown will come to me and my children’.
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History

Finding the grave of Queen Victoria's childhood nurse

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23rd May 2019
Mrs Brock was the future Queen Victoria’s nurse. Called by her ‘dear Boppy’ (op. cit., Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 21), she remained Princess Victoria’s nurse until the age of five, after which she passed into the better-known hands of…
HistoryInsight

Tea and Queen Victoria

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20th May 2019
Queen Victoria is for many, synonymous with the notion of afternoon tea, probably because the social ceremony became properly established during the later years of her reign. The Queen’s evident love of tea, however, reaches back much further than this elegant ritual.
History

Queen Victoria's presents to her grandchildren

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14th May 2019
As the ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as Queen Victoria was popularly termed, her very numerous grandchildren could, of course, expect to receive a variety of charming presents for their birthdays, just as we might treasure things sent to us by our grandmothers. These presents are in themselves interesting because they lend insight into the kind of gifts the Queen considered would give pleasure to…
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