The Victoria Letters: The official companion to the ITV Victoria series. Helen Rappaport
as Victoria when she became Queen, and then I thought, what would happen if she woke up one morning and found that she was the most famous woman in the world? From that moment on I started writing scenes in my head, and the idea for Victoria the TV series was born.
From the beginning I wanted to show Victoria as a girl who had to do her growing up in public. Most of us get to make our adolescent mistakes in private but Victoria had to do everything under the scrutiny of her courtiers, the press and the public. There were no royal spin doctors in those days, and when Victoria made mistakes, and she made some serious ones in the early years of her reign, there was no press office to hide behind. There were plenty of people who thought that an 18-year-old girl could not be an effective monarch.
But it is clear when you read Victoria’s own words that she was a woman with an extraordinary sense of her own identity. Despite having every aspect of her early life controlled by her mother and her mother’s advisor Sir John Conroy, Victoria was not moulded by them. From the moment she came to the throne she was determined to do things her way. To take one example, as a baby she had been christened Alexandrina Victoria after her godfather, Alexander of Russia, and her mother Victorine; as a little girl she was called Drina by her mother and her governess Lehzen. But on her accession she decided that instead of taking a ‘queenly’ name like Mary or Elizabeth, she wanted to be called Queen Victoria – this was shocking at the time because the name Victoria was completely new, but Victoria, my heroine, knew instinctively that it was the right name for her. In that sense at least, she created the Victorian age.
I have used the girl that springs out of Victoria’s diaries and letters as the basis for the character that Jenna Coleman plays with such skill in the series. I hope that watching the show will make people curious about Victoria, and this book, so brilliantly put together by the nineteenth-century expert Helen Rappaport, is the perfect place to start if you want to know the history behind the series.
I hope that the series and this book will show that Victoria is very much a heroine for our times. In many ways she is the first woman to have it all – her struggles to be a wife and mother as well as a queen resonate across the centuries. She wasn’t perfect but she was brave and resolute and a great deal more than an old lady in a bonnet.
~DAISY GOODWIN, SCREENWRITER OF VICTORIA
THE HEART AND MIND OF A YOUNG QUEEN
‘All trades must be learned, and nowadays the trade of a constitutional Sovereign, to do it well, is a very difficult one.’
– King Leopold to Queen Victoria –
– 16 January 1838 –
FEW MONARCHS IN BRITISH HISTORY have been so extensively written about as Queen Victoria. Like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, it seems that nothing can dim our enduring fascination with her or our hunger for new film and TV dramatisations of her life. Much like her two charismatic Tudor predecessors, Queen Victoria has been the subject of endless interpretation and re-evaluation, and one might think there is nothing new left to say, no new revelations to be made.
Until now, most dramatisations have concentrated on the older, more mature queen, and in particular on her life after Albert, as a widow. But in this new eight-part series for ITV, screenwriter Daisy Goodwin has put the Queen’s very first faltering steps as monarch under the microscope.
‘This book, Mamma gave me’
– Victoria –
ON 31 JULY 1832, the first page of the story of Victoria’s long life was written, when as a 13-year-old princess and already Heir Presumptive to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she inscribed the flyleaf of the shiny new red leather journal presented to her by her mother:
This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales.
~ VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 31 JULY 1832
Over the next 70 years, what began as an educational exercise in recording the relatively mundane events of her young life, to be submitted for daily inspection to her governess and her mother, would grow into 141 handwritten volumes – probably the greatest and most enduring personal record written by any queen at any time in history.
Beginning with her first childish observations of people, places and events, young Princess Victoria recorded a detailed description of her daily life at Kensington Palace, her love for her dolls and her dog Dash; and spoke poignantly of her isolation from the outside world. On her accession in 1837, and moving to Buckingham Palace, she filled the pages of her journals with fascinating accounts of the people who made the greatest impression on her (notably her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne), her hopes and aspirations about the onerous responsibility of becoming Queen that had been thrust upon her very young shoulders, and the joy of finding love and a happy marriage, so rare in the dynastic scheme of things.
In tandem with her diary, Queen Victoria’s enormous output of letters dating from 1832 chart a queen in the making and show her wrestling with some of the challenging political issues of her day and making her first difficult decisions as monarch.
This book, in tandem with the television series, tells the touching and intimate developing story of the young princess who became Queen in 1837, based closely on her journals and letters and featuring many key quotations from them. The Victoria Letters reveals at first hand a view of the queen who became our second-longest-reigning monarch after Queen Elizabeth II, with all her quirks and foibles, her impetuosity and her compassion.
~ HELEN RAPPAPORT, JUNE 2016
‘It was a rather melancholy childhood’
– Victoria –
ON 28 APRIL 1819 A RAGGLE-TAGGLE CONVOY of 20 carriages, thick with the dust and grime of 30 days on bumpy roads from Amorbach in Bavaria, rattled up the drive of London’s Kensington Palace. The journey its exhausted occupants had just completed – along with a mountain of luggage, two Russian lapdogs and a cage of singing birds – had been a frenetic race against time to ensure that the first legitimate heir to the British throne to be produced by any of George III’s sons be born in England.
The soon-to-be parents were Edward, Duke of Kent – the fourth of the nine sons of George III – and his wife, Marie Louise Victoire, formerly a princess of the German duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. They had until now been living at Amorbach in greatly straitened circumstances – thanks to an accumulation of debts brought on by the Duke’s compulsive overspending from the moment he completed his military training.
Their one hope of a change in fortunes had followed the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales (the Duke’s niece and Duchess’s sister-in-law), who had died tragically in 1817. If the Duke outlived his elder, childless brothers, he would become King. And the child his wife was soon to bear, the one most likely to outlive them all, would be fifth in line to the British throne.