Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria

Victoria, a British’s girl, created an empire on which the sun never set. Victoria (1819-1901) was queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 to 1901 and empress of India from 1876 to 1901. She presided over the expansion of England into an empire of 4 million square miles and 124 million people.

Victoria was born Alexandra Victoria at Kensington Palace, London, on May 24, 1819.Alexandrina Victoria was the only child of the fourth son of King George III: Edward, duke of Kent and Strathern. Her father died a little after Victoria’s birth. Her mother was Victoria Maria Louisa of Saxe-Coburg, sister of King Leopold of the Belgians and daughter of the duke of Saxe-coburg-Saalfeld. Victoria was a lively child. A governess educated her at home. Victoria learned to speak and write French and German as easily as she spoke English. She also studied history, geography, and the Bible. She was taught how to play the piano. She had a gift for drawing and painting, a hobby that she enjoyed into her 60s. Victoria kept a detailed diary. Her

famous journal is in 111 manuscript volumes.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the Queen of England during the time when her country was the most powerful country in the world. Queen Victoria is the longest monarch in British history. Her reign was the longest of any monarch in British history and came to be known as the Victorian era. Historically the Victorian age is remarkable for the growth of democracy following the Reform Bill of 1832; for the spread of education among all classes; for the rapid development of the arts and sciences; for important mechanical inventions; and for the enormous extension of the bounds of human knowledge by the discoveries of science. She became Queen at the age of 18 on Ju ne 20, 1837 because William IV, Victoria’s Uncle, had no children.At that time, the United Kingdom was already an established constitutional monarchy, in which the Sovereign held relatively few direct political powers. Privately, she attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments. Publicly, she became a national icon, and was identified with strict standards of personal morality.Queen Victoria tested the limits of her royal powers when the government of Lord Melbourne, the Whig who had been her mentor, fell the next year. She refused to follow precedent and dismiss her ladies of the bedchamber so that the Tory government could replace them. Her refusal brought back the Whigs until 1841. As a monarch, she put the country’s interest in heart, and she regarded it as her life. She is just a woman, but she sacrifices herself to the country. Because of her, the Britain become greater and greater and all the people remember her; the Victoria Era is spread to the world and never forgets. During her reign of 64 years, which period is Britain’s most powerful period called ―sun-never-set Empire‖. Queen’s reign in English history knows as the Victorian Era. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire.During this period, it reached its zenith and became the foremost global power of the time. She was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover; her son and successor Edward VII belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Victoria was the first reigning monarch to use trains. Also Queen Victoria becomes a symbol of peace and prosperity in the United Kingdom. She was not one of the most intelligent rulers in the history of England, but

she was one of the most popular. Her people loved her. In my opinion, Queen Victoria is not only a monarch, but also a person who cares her people. She will respect by all the British, even the people all over the world.

Victoria first learned of her future role as a young princess during a history lesson when she

was 10 years old. Almost four decades later Victoria's governess recalled that the future queen

reacted to the discovery by declaring, "I will be good." This combination of earnestness and

egotism marked Victoria as a child of the age that bears her name. The queen, however, rejected

important Victorian values and developments. A mother of nine who hated pregnancy and

childbirth, detested babies, and was uncomfortable in the presence of children, Victoria reigned in

a society that idealized both motherhood and the family. She had no interest in social issues, yet

the 19th century in Britain was an age of reform. She resisted technological change even while

mechanical and technological innovations reshaped the face of European civilization.

Most significantly, Victoria was a queen determined to retain political power; yet unwillingly

and unwittingly she presided over the transformation of the sovereign's political role into a

ceremonial one and thus preserved the English monarchy. When Victoria became queen, the

political role of the crown was by no means clear; nor was the permanence of the throne itself.

When she died and her son Edward VII moved from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace,

the change was one of social rather than of political focus; there was no doubt about the

monarchy's continuance. That was the measure of her reign.

Queen Victoria had large blue eyes, a cupid-bow mouth, smooth light-brown hair that darkened with age, and a receding chin. She was under 5 feet and as a girl was slender, then plump. By the time she was 26 she was stout and remained so, except after periods of illness, until the end. She had a silvery voice, enunciated excellently, without a trace of the German accent of her eldest son, and had a radiant, though rare, smile. Those she disliked, William Gladstone for example, found her somber and terrifying; her ladies, servants, and grandchildren thought she looked "so dear" and idolized her.

The most important person in her life was her husband, Albert. Attracted by Albert's good looks and encouraged by her uncle Leopold, Victoria proposed to her cousin on Oct. 15, 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor on a visit to the English court. She described her impressions of him in the journal she kept throughout her life: "Albert really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome, a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going." They were married on Feb. 10, 1840, the queen dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture. She loved him very much and always listened to his advice. They set a great example of devotion to family. Victoria had nine children. Her first child, Victoria, later empress of Germany, was born in 1840, and the prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in 1841. Their nine children and 26 of their 34 grandchildren who survived childhood married heirs to thrones of Spain, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Romania. Because this, Victoria became known as the ―Grandmother of Europe.‖The marriage of her daughters into other royal families, and the likelihood that her children bore a mutant gene for hemophilia, both affected the following

generations of European history. Victoria had traditional views on the role of the wife and mother, and though she was Queen and Albert was Prince Consort, he shared government responsibilities at least equally. Albert died in 1861 at the young age of 42. Queen Victoria was heartbroken. Victoria plunged into deep mourning and avoided public appearances.Her prolonged mourning lost her much popularity. As a result of her seclusion, republicanism temporarily gained strength, but in the latter half of her reign, her popularity recovered. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilees were times of public celebration.During her lifetime she published her Letters, Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands and More Leaves. In her old age, Victoria was enormously popular. Jubilees were held in 1887 and 1897 to celebrate the 50th and 60th years of the longest English reign. The queen was not highly intelligent, but her conscientiousness and strict morals helped to restore the prestige of the crown and to establish it as a symbol of public service and imperial unity. Having witnessed a revolution in British government, huge industrial expansion and the growth of a worldwide empire, Victoria died on 22 January 1901 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She is buried at Windsor Castle beside Prince Albert. She was succeeded by her son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. He became King Edward VII.

The Victorian Era of the United Kingdom was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from June 1837 to January 1901. This was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop. Some scholars would extend the beginning of the period-as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victorians-back five years to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.

The era was preceded by the Georgian period and succeeded by the Edwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Epoque era of continental Europe.

The era is often characterized as a long period of peace, known as the Pax Britannica, and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War, although Britain was at war every year during this time. Towards the end of the century, the policies of New Imperialism led to increasing colonial conflicts and eventually the Anglo-Zanzibar War and the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform and the widening of the voting franchise.

The population of England had almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901. Ireland's population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901.

In the early part of the era the House of Commons was dominated by the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. From the late 1850s onwards the Whigs became the Liberals even as the Tories became known as the Conservatives. These parties were led by many prominent statesmen including Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating to Irish Home Rule played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement.

The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Writers like Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy showed their primary concern is about the people in the society with sympathy for the poor and the unfortunate and became the major voice of the literary world by presenting a faithful picture of the horrible capitalist England. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. Charles Dickens hates the social evils and intends social reform by exposing and criticizing in his works all the poverty, injustice, hypocrisy and corruption in the 19th –century England. He thinks that the state should intervene to control the rapacity of landlords and capitalists. He wants improvement in the life of the poor, but is afraid of a real revolution. Dickens is a humanitarian who pours all his love and sympathy for those poor, weak, innocent, injured and neglected good people. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed. The sub-title of the book emphasizes the fact that the writer’s intention was not to portray individuals, but the bourgeois and aristocratic society as a whole. Building his plot around the fates of Amelia Sedley and Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, Thackeray managed to show a picture of the life of the ruling classes of England. The novel remains a classical example of social satire up to the present day. The title was taken form Bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) seems to belong to the present rather than to a past age. In style, Hardy is direct and simple, aiming at realism in all things. Hardy makes man an insignificant part of the world, struggling against powers greater than himself,---sometimes against systems which he cannot reach or influence, sometimes against a kind of grim world-spirit who delights in making human affairs go wrong. He is, therefore, hardly a realist, but rather a man blinded by pessimism; and his novels, though generally powerful and sometimes fascinating, are not pleasant or wholesome reading. From the reader’s view point some of his earli er works, like the idyllic love story Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), are the most interesting. Hardy became noted when he published Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Return of the Native (1878) and The Woodlanders are generally regarded as his masterpieces; but two novels of our own day, Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), are better expressions of Hardy’s literary art and of his gloomy philosophy.

Among the Victorian masters of nonfiction were the great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the historian, social critic, and prophet whose rhetoric thundered through the age. Influential thinkers included John Stuart Mill, the great liberal scholar and philosopher; Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and popularizer of Darwinian theory; and John Henry, Cardinal Newman, who wrote earnestly of religion, philosophy, and education. The founders of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, researched and wrote their books in the free environment of England. The great art historian and critic John Ruskin also concerned himself with social and economic problems. Matthew Arnold's theories of literature and culture laid the foundations for modern literary criticism, and his poetry is also notable.

The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in subject matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude and religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes. Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion. Some fine religious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson.

There were many famous quotes by Queen Victoria.

"We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist."

"A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one."

"None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world -- so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal."

"The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of Woman's Rights with all its attendant horrors on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety."

"His purity was too great, his aspiration too high for this poor, miserable world! His great soul is now only enjoying that for which it was worthy!"

"We placed the wreaths upon the splendid granite sarcophagus, and at its feet, and felt that only the earthly robe we loved so much was there. The pure, tender, loving spirit which loved us so tenderly, is above us -- loving us, praying for us, and free from all suffering and woe -- yes, that is a comfort, and that first birthday in another world must have been a far brighter one than any in this poor world below!"