Word: victoria
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...Victorian stereotype alone does not explain the woman's extraordinary fascination for biographers. Kings and queens are not, as a rule, very interesting people-the house of Hanover, in particular, had a flair of dullness, except when its sons were deranged by porphyria or brandy-and Victoria was one of the few British monarchs to be a wholly singular creature. "She not merely filled the chair. She filled the room," remarked the Duke of Wellington, a man not easily impressed, when he saw her after she had received the news of William IV's death...
...personality was so intriguing, the life so long (by her death in 1901, Victoria had reigned for 64 years and been served by no less than ten Prime Ministers), the power so great, the politics so convoluted and the documentation so rich that Victoria became the subject of 19th century biography...
Cecil Woodham-Smith's Victoria is the first of two books. It takes the sovereign's life as far as the death of Albert, her prince consort, in 1861. The author had access to the Royal Family Archives at Windsor, and her rich effort at historical reconstruction is one of the finest biographies in English since George Painter's classic Marcel Proust. It is also an engrossing love story. Woodham-Smith is a historian, not a Crawfie. Her romance, moreover, is told without sentimentality and is set against the forbidding complexities of 19th century European politics...
...Victoria took the throne at a time when it seemed the English monarchy could be either liked or respected, but not both. "Notwithstanding his feebleness of purpose and littleness of mind, his ignorance and his prejudices," the Spectator editorialized after her uncle's death, "William the Fourth was to the last a popular sovereign; but his very popularity was acquired at the price of something like public contempt...
...Victoria gave the crown its prestige again. An iron toughness of spirit enabled her to do so. Indeed without such a will, even her childhood would have been insupportable. Her father, one of the brutish Hanoverian dukes, died when she was only one year old. The widowed duchess then came under the influence of an Irish swindler named John Conroy. It was he who set up the famous "Kensington system" for rearing Victoria. Its aim was to make her totally dependent upon her pathetic mother and so, by remote control, upon Conroy. Little Victoria had to sleep in her mother...