Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
Part 3: Taking position – ‘the locale’ The residences which are most closely associated with Victoria and Albert’s domestic idyll, and that of their burgeoning family, were not palaces or state apartments but retreats. The cost of reimagining the far more modest abodes that had until the late 1840s and early 1850s occupied two sites at almost opposite ends of the kingdom would have been prohibitive to all but the wealthiest. Yet Osborne House and Balmoral Castle, the former almost
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In behaving publicly much like members of the mid-nineteenth-century middle class, Victoria and Albert achieved great influence – both by making their subjects aspire to be like them, and by displaying their contemporaneity with those they ruled. This examination of aspects of the royal family’s domestic life, and of the image they presented to the nation, makes reference to selected diary entries and correspondence of Queen Victoria, and to imagery illustrating how Victoria and Albert might appear to their contemporaries almost as being ‘just like us’.
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By Michael Roberts Personal diaries are generally welcomed as a godsend by historians but their publication can raise complicated questions for editors and publishers. Most Victorianists, given a few seconds’ reflection, will be able to find illustrations to fit: the publisher John Murray, for example, burning Byron’s Journals before witnesses rather than risk scandal; Gladstone’s sons entrusting the great man’s diaries to the Archbishop of Canterbury until enough time might pass to dissipate scandal. One famous nineteenth-century diary to go
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