The Letters of Queen Victoria

"Victoria was completely un-Victorian. She had an extraordinarily broad-minded, humane quality to her. It’s very seldom in her letters that you find what we might (incorrectly) think of as a Victorian narrowness of viewpoint. She has an amazing breadth of comprehension, which is not necessarily related to anything that she’s read. Because although she did read books, she wasn’t an intellectual. It’s rather a sort of instinctive wisdom, possibly derived from her very bizarre childhood. It’s not a childhood one would have wished on anyone – with an awful mother and sinister hangers-on in court, and the sense that apart from her old uncle William [IV] on the throne, she was the only one of her family left and would be Queen. A terrific self-confidence comes across in her letters. The absolute, cast-iron belief that she is number one and there is no challenge to that. One of her amusing human faults was that she clearly resented being upstaged by other people. Either by other sovereigns – she also wanted to be number one sovereign in the eyes of the world – or by celebrated personalities. For example, there’s a letter which she wrote to Lord Lyons, British ambassador in Paris in the late 19th century, about the huge Paris funeral of Victor Hugo . She quite obviously thinks, “Why is this man getting all this attention?” And there is a frisson, a scintilla of envy that goes through it. So Lyons has to give her a great long description of the funeral. Apart from anything else, she was also personally very interested in funerals, illness and death. Her letters to ministers are notorious for their downrightness and directness. “The Queen believes…” et cetera, written in the third person and never “I”. But the great correspondence, that goes across 40 years, is with her eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, who become Empress of Germany, the so-called Empress Frederick. In that she just lets herself rip. It’s a real rollercoaster of a correspondence. It’s emotional, it’s gossipy, it’s crammed with comment on contemporary events. Sometimes it’s a ding-dong battle between the two women, and I would love to have the other side of the correspondence, which was never published but presumably exists somewhere. She often takes a point of view that you don’t expect. There is this unexpectedly liberal side to somebody whom we think of as being conservative and reactionary. The physicality of womanhood was something that both fascinated and repulsed her. Although she had nine children and was what might be called good breeding stock, she saw pregnancy as the occupational hazard of sex with Alfred. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, there is this other side to our conventional idea of Victorians. Queen Victoria, as I said, was not a Victorian. She had been brought up in a time – the late Regency and the reign of George IV – when people winked or cynically shrugged their shoulders at things. She had inherited a lot of those attitudes and values. This is probably why she hated bishops. She hated the clergy generally, although obviously she had to deal with it a lot as head of the Church of England. But in a way it reminded her of a stuffiness and disapproval that was not something with which she had grown up."