The Warrior Queen: Reflections on Victoria and Her World

Abstract

The subject of monarchy remains more fashionable in the pages of People and the National Inquirer than among NEH peer review panelists or professional historians generally. To a surprising degree, indeed, the subject has been left to non-professionals or to non-historians. Yet, when one reflects on the fact that the best-known wedding and the most traumatic funeral of the twentieth century both involved the British monarchy in a very immediate fashion, then one can hardly contend that that institution is of no account in modern cultural history. In the course of the past decade, I have drafted, and in part published, a series of topical essays involving Queen Victoria as symbol, as personality, and as actor on the political stage, and this paper constitutes a consideration of yet another facet of her world. In the process of exploring Queen Victoria's world in both printed and unpublished sources, I have made two discoveries that may not surprise you unduly once I set them forth.First, each major biographer of Queen Victoria—and there have been a great many—tends to react to the last major previous biographers. Thus Giles St. Aubyn in 1991 and Stanley Weintraub in 1987 drafted their works in the context of Elizabeth Longford's biography of 1964 and Cecil Woodham-Smith's life of 1972. The latter two wrote their lives in reaction to Lytton Strachey's biography of 1921 and Arthur Benson's of 1930. In the process, these more recent historians have at times unwittingly neglected a number of cogent conclusions reached by Sidney Lee way back in 1902.