Queen Victoria and the “Bloody Mary of Madagascar”

Abstract

This article demonstrates how a broad cross-section of Britons—including government officials, missionaries, journalists, novelists, and travelers—used the controversial Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar (who reigned from 1828 to 1861) as a means of defining and delimiting Queen Victoria’s own reign during the British monarch’s first decades on the throne. In highlighting Ranavalona’s critical, though heretofore largely overlooked, role in the construction of Victoria, this article makes two key contributions. First, it draws heightened attention to the transnational and imperial dimensions of the process by which Victorians “made” their queen. Second, it illuminates the depth and persistence of “problems of female rule” in Victorian Britain, problems that the foreign female sovereigns with whom Britons regularly interacted did as much to perpetuate as to resolve.