Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey

First published: 1921

Type of work: Biography

Time of work: 1819-1901

Locale: England and Germany

Principal Personages:

• George IV, King of England, whose death brought Victoria to the throne
• The Duke of Kent, Victoria’s father
• The Princess of Saxe-Coburg, Victoria’s mother
• Alexandrina Victoria, Queen Victoria of England
• Fraulien Lehzen, Victoria’s influencial governess
• Baron Stockmar, King Leopold’s physician and adviser, later Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s
• King Leopold of Belgium, Victoria’s uncle
• Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, Victoria’s cousin and influencial, beloved husband
• Victoria, the Princess Royal,
• Edward, Prince of Wales,
• Princess Alice,
• Prince Alfred,
• Princess Helena,
• Princess Louise,
• Prince Arthur,
• Prince Leopold, and
• Princess Beatrice, the nine royal children
• Lord Melbourne,
• William Lambe,
• Sir Robert Peel,
• Lord Palmerston,
• Henry John Temple,
• Benjamin Disraeli, and
• William Ewart Gladstone, influencial Prime Ministers

Analysis

Objecting to the standard “life” of the nineteenth century biographer, Lytton Strachey founded a significant new school of biography. He transformed the ideal biography from a long, redundant eulogy to a concise, clear, and factual account of the subject’s life. With the publication of QUEEN VICTORIA he graphically illustrated that biography could be an art without following the “classical models” of Boswell’s JOHNSON or Lockhart’s SCOTT. The small biography is restrained; the author is detached; the tone is ironic; and the style is polished. QUEEN VICTORIA presents a woman as well as a queen, a woman who comes alive as we share Strachey’s impressions of her long life.

Strachey opens the biography with an inevitably complicated resume of the future queen’s disreputable—indeed scandalous—uncles, especially of the notorious Prince Regent, who became George IV, and the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV. Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, married only when he thought that he and his children might succeed to the English throne. Victoria’s mother, the Princess of Saxe-Coburg, discovered after her marriage that her husband was impoverished, but she also knew that if she could bear a child before her sisters-in-law, that child would be ruler of England. On May 24, 1819, she gave birth, but the child was a girl, later to be christened Alexandrina Victoria against her father’s wishes. This birth was practically ignored; the English were waiting for the birth of a boy.

The child, reared in obscurity at Kensington, was placed under the governance of Fraulein Lehzen, daughter of a Hanoverian clergyman and the only person who could control the little “Drina’s” outbursts of temper. Under the influence of this governess the future queen was taught to be horrified at the shameless behavior of her uncles, and always to be mindful of the virtues of simplicity, regularity, propriety, and devotion. Victoria never forgot her lessons. The Duchess of Kent had decided that her daughter would become a “Christian queen,” regardless of the child’s happiness. When Victoria was eleven, her mother invited the Bishops of London and Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury to examine her; she passed, displaying a great variety of Christian knowledge. Still she was not told that she was, in fact, to be Queen of England. When she finally learned of the responsibility eventually to be thrust upon her, she calmly accepted her duty.

But before the day when she would actually become Queen of England, two things happened to the young girl: she met and fell madly in love with her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, and she discovered that her mother was having an affair with Sir John Conroy. When Victoria became queen, she entirely separated herself from her mother and momentarily forgot the “beautiful” German prince. She fell under the rigid influence of Fraulein Lehzen and of the Prime Minister, William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, and she thought that she was happy. She thought that she was free to do as she pleased without her mother’s prying eyes, but the eyes and advice of Lehzen and Melbourne were as prying and confining as her mother had been. For example, Victoria was led by her advisers to believe the groundless rumors against Lady Flora Hastings and, as a result, lost the support of the English public. Also she interfered with the government more than many of her subjects thought she should, and thereby she turned the English against her.

In 1840 she married Prince Albert, with whom she was still madly in love. Albert, however, had a will of his own and was not in love with his doting bride. Although he was his wife’s intellectual superior and interested in the arts, she let him entertain no scholars or literary men. He had a much better mind for politics, but she was so influenced by Fraulein Lehzen that she would not discuss politics with him. In short, Prince Albert was a miserably unhappy young man who felt that fate had tricked him into an unpleasant marriage. But the prince was advised by clever Baron Stockmar, one of the best political advisers in Europe, and Stockmar taught him the way to make his will known. Victoria worshiped her husband, and he used her feelings for his own ends. Very slowly Fraulein Lehzen was pushed into the background and Prince Albert became the leading power behind the throne. In fact, he finally exerted so much influence over Victoria that he was King of England in everything but name. He was still bored, without sympathy for the English whom he considered either too frivolous or too gloomy and unhappy.

Despite Prince Albert’s unhappiness, Queen Victoria was happy. Her family was growing; she thought that she was married to the wisest and most perfect man in the world, to the extent that she despised her subjects when they did not agree; and she was untroubled by political intrigue. Prince Albert discovered a way to forget his misery; he lost himself in his work. First, he reformed the organization of the royal household, overcoming abuses and saving much money. Second, he became Victoria’s private secretary, had a full voice in politics, and was respected for his well-conceived opinions on political matters. Third, he organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbol of English ingenuity and of the full bloom of the Victorian Age. The Great Exhibition took two years to complete and cost so much that popularity turned against Albert. But when it closed, over six million people had visited it and England had been recognized as the first industrial power in Europe.

But the Great Exhibition was followed by trouble from one man, especially hated by the royal couple: Lord Palmerston. Palmerston was ambitious, crude, and impatient; he played the game of international politics cynically, much to Prince Albert’s horror, and aided revolutionists, republican movements, and the overthrows of the monarchies throughout Europe, much to Victoria’s horror. In fact, he seemed to be a fanatic who did not realize the consequences of his behavior. The dispute between the royal couple and the ambitious politician involved England in one of the most senseless wars of her history, the Crimean War between Russia and Turkey. The issues of this war were not clear; the end of the war was mysterious. But Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister as a result of it.

Despite the political intrigue, Victoria was happy in her three-fold role of queen, wife, and mother, and she had become a symbol of the ideal, especially in the last two roles. Her nine children, her farms, and her dairies needed to be looked after with the same care that she employed in the affairs of her country. The Prince of Wales was a special problem for her because he refused to adhere to the “obligations” laid down by his mother and father. Her children began to marry into the royal houses of Europe, and she passed many days with her consort in almost idyllic happiness. But such happiness was not to last. In 1861 Prince Albert became sick and died, partly because Victoria had refused to believe the seriousness of his condition and call better doctors to his bedside.

This was the turning point of her life. From Prince Albert’s death until her own, she was a mysterious figure to the English, a woman clothed in black and separated from the ordinary affairs of life. She felt her loss more deeply than most because she had become so dependent on her consort for advice; in fact, she felt that with his death England had lost a sovereign. Consequently, she was determined to spend the rest of her life convincing the English people that Albert had really been what she believed he was. She supervised the publication of massive biographies, intrigued to have statues of him erected in major cities, and finally planned and executed a magnificent memorial, Albert Hall. Still she was not cheerful. Her popularity had decreased so much that people openly questioned whether a royal family was worth the money and greatly curtailed the royal allowance. Victoria felt that she was surrounded by hostility, by people who refused to sympathize with her grief, and she came to hate her subjects more and more. But all was not so gloomy. Disraeli, now Prime Minister, won her respect and full support and lightened her unhappiness by such little things as calling her “Faery”—an allusion to Gloriana in THE FAERIE QUEENE—and giving her the title “Empress of India.” She responded with such delightful trivia as gifts of primroses and a peerage. Also, Gladstone’s adoration of her as a figure mysteriously and augustly set above and apart from others caused the public to begin to view her with increasing awe; few of her subjects could remember any other monarch. This adoration did two things: it strengthened the position of the crown but weakened the political power of the monarch. Also the seven frustrated attempts to assassinate her ennobled her in her subjects’ eyes.

Toward the end of her long life, Victoria had become an institution and a symbol. Her manners and morals were impeccable: for example, she never allowed a divorced woman to enter court and she frowned on second marriages. She even kept Prince Albert’s room as a shrine. Her strong sense of duty was an institution shared by her public. Also she was the symbol of the age that bears her name, especially of the imperialism that she so stanchly supported. When she died on January 22, 1901, an age died with her.

Lytton Strachey has not been always fair with the facts, but he has created his impressions in such a clear-cut and fascinating manner that he sweeps the reader into the life of Victoria, revealed as a woman, a great but intellectually limited queen, and a loving wife.