In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Young Victoria by Deirdre Murphy
  • Miles Taylor (bio)
The Young Victoria, by Deirdre Murphy; pp. 224. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $45.00, £35.00.

This sumptuously illustrated volume is one of the more original studies to appear at the bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth. Although not entirely neglected, the first two decades of Victoria's life are usually skipped over quickly by historians, keen to get to the coronation and usher Prince Albert into her life. Monica Charlot's 1991 biographical account, subtitled "The Young Queen," was just that: a political history of the early years of her reign. Kate Williams's Becoming Queen (2008), although well researched, was too racy a romp to be taken seriously within the field of royal studies. Only Lynn Vallone's Becoming Victoria (2001), also published by Yale some twenty years ago, stands out as a sophisticated and erudite reconstruction of Victoria's childhood and adolescence in her own words, and most revealing of all, through her schoolbooks and juvenile drawings and paintings. Now The Young Victoria looks set to become a fine companion to Vallone's pioneering work. As a curator at Kensington Palace (Victoria's childhood home and now a museum), the author, the late Deirdre Murphy, was able to assemble a huge range of artefacts—clothing and jewelry, furniture and other household items, sculpture, paintings and sketches, cartoons and journals—that brilliantly recreate the young princess's world. While some of the more formal royal portraits reproduced in the book will be familiar, there is so much here that is not. The bulk of it comes from the Royal Collections and the prints and drawings division of the British Museum, but Murphy also scoured provincial and overseas art galleries, the National Archives (for architectural plans), and the National Trust. Among the hundreds of items featured in the book, three stand out as especially eye-catching: William Behnes's eerily life-like wax bust of the nine-year-old Victoria, with painted features and real hair; George Morley's oil painting of her pet Shetland ponies, complete with jewel-encrusted bridles; and a chromolithograph pop-up card, entitled "The Crown Imperial, or Victoria Lily," in which the moveable head of the new queen could be maneuvered upwards from the stem of the flower.

The gradual emergence of Victoria from her secluded early years is the main theme of this book, which is much more than a commentary or guide to the art on display. Murphy seeks to reevaluate Victoria's melancholy childhood, a "personal mythology" which she clung to throughout her life, and particularly after the death of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, in the spring of 1861, some nine months before she lost Albert as well (13). On the face of it, her childhood was not so much morose as muddled. Her father, the Duke of Kent, died before her first birthday, leaving hefty debts and his German widow and the baby princess more or less in the hands of his equerry, John Conroy. Where Victoria sat in the line of succession to the British crown was unclear for much of her childhood. Other heirs to the throne came and went, but right up to Victoria's accession it was assumed that there would be another regency due to her youth. And although she was close to the throne in theory, she was far removed in practice. As Murphy emphasizes, Conroy and the Duchess kept the princess away from the increasingly awful George IV, while his successor, William IV, went out of his way to ostracize her.

Yet, despite the fog of confusion that surrounded her future, the young Victoria was groomed for rule. At the heart of Murphy's book is a thorough reconsideration of the Kensington system whereby she was schooled and controlled behind closed doors [End Page 604] by her mother and Conroy (a character likened to Mephistopheles by Prince Leopold, Victoria's uncle and mentor). Her later so-called melancholy stems from memories of this lonely and over-policed upbringing. But as Murphy shows in a revealing coda to her study, this was a classic case of childhood...

pdf

Share