The Journals of Queen Victoria by Fay Bound Alberti

In today's blog, I want to discuss a historical source unknown to many people: the journals of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Queen of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Empress of India from 1876.

This online resource was completed in 2012 and is now free to access for residents of the UK. It offers fascinating insights into the life of the longest serving British monarch to date, and some fascinating asides from which to reconstruct nineteenth-century society and culture.

http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do 

Queen Victoria started writing diaries when she was aged just 13 years old, using a book given to her for the purpose by her mother. "This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it", she wrote, starting a habit that lasted from 1832 to the monarch's death in 1901. These were not initially the private record we associate with teenager diaries today; her mother inspected the diaries every day, until Victoria became Queen.

The journals detail many aspects of Queen Victoria's life, from her love affair and marriage to Albert (and her devastation when he died) to matters of state, her love for her family, and her relationship with her family, friends and acquaintances.

Thirteen of the volumes in Victoria's own handwriting survive. Many of the remaining volumes were transcribed after her death by her youngest daughter Beatrice, who followed her mother's instructions (and perhaps her own idea of propriety) in removing sections that might prove controversial. Most of the originals from 1840 were then destroyed.

Queen Victoria completing her correspondence with Mohammed Abdul Karim, who served
during the final 14 years of Queen Victoria's reign.

All together there are 131 surviving volumes of Queen Victoria's journals, totalling over 43,000 pages. Until recently this material was only accessible by visiting the Royal Archives. The diary entries appear as scanned copies of Victoria (and Beatrice's) own handwriting, accompanied by typed versions that make reading simple.

Searchable by keyword, the online materials allow detailed study for historians and researchers, and make fascinating reading.

On 28 June 1838, for instance, a young Victoria records her experience of her coronation, a day that was marked by relative economy, just 18 years after the extravagant coronation of George IV. Visitors thronged to London, delivered by the new railway system and around half a million people were said to have gathered to watch proceedings, entertained by a balloon ascent and a firework display in Green Park, and illuminations and a fair in Hyde Park.

The Coronation of Queen Victoria

The event did not go quite as planned - there had been no rehearsals, and the train bearers kept falling over, and there was a lot of uncertainty about who should stand where. The Queen complained that the Bishop of Durham was hopeless and had given her no instructions, nor had the Archbishop 'who (as usual) was so confused and knew nothing' that he put the coronation ring onto the wrong finger.

While the attending crowds were excited by the pomp and ceremony, not all agreed with the money being spent, or the extravagance of the occasion. The writer and economist Harriet Martineau, described the peeresses she saw in Westminster Abbey as 'Old hags, with their dyed or false hair drawn to the top of the head, to allow the putting on of the coronet, had their necks and arms bare and glittering with diamonds, and those necks and arms were so brown and wrinkled as to make one sick'.

Victoria was just 18 years old when crowned Queen and her diaries describe the excitement of the day. She had been woken at 4am by guns in the park and could not sleep because of the 'noise of the people, bands, &c. Got up at 7 feeling strong and well; the Park presented a curious spectacle, crowds of people up to Constitution Hill, soldiers, bands, etc.'

At 9.30am she dressed in her 'House of Lords costume' and soon after got into the State Coach. 'It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen, many as there were, the day I went to the City, it was nothing - nothing to the multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession... I was alarmed at times for her that the people would be crushed and squeezed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure'.

Once in the Abbey, Queen Victoria took notice of the clothes her attendants were wearing and the faces and expressions of the people who attended her. She seemed giddy and excited and touched by the emotional response of her 'excellent Lord Melbourne [who] stood very close to me throughout the whole ceremony'. He had been 'completely overcome ... and very much affected; he gave me such a kind, and I may say, fatherly look. The shouts which were very great, the drums, the trumpets, the firing of the guns, all at the same instant, rendered the spectacle most imposing'.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne was the British whig statesman who served as Home Secretary (1830-1834) and Prime Minister (1834 and 1835-1841). It has been rumoured that Victoria was in love with Melbourne and even proposed to him, but in the diaries her affection for him was protective and fond, more like that of a daughter for a father.

Celebrations continued well into the evening on the day of the Coronation, and Melbourne asked Victoria whether she was bearing up, concerned she might be over-tired. He complained that the Sword of State that he carried was very heavy and Victoria said that her Crown was also heavy and 'hurt [her] a great deal'. She stayed in the drawing room until 11.20pm that evening, talking to Melbourne and others, then remained on a balcony to watch the fireworks in Green Park until midnight.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

The following morning, Queen Victoria got up at 10.30am and breakfasted at 11.30. Lord Melbourne 'was very far from well... he looked so pale and weak and his poor eyes so suffering.' She expressed concern that the Coronation had been too much for him, as he hadn't gone to bed until 1am. Melbourne assured her that he had prepared himself for a long day with a 'strong dose of brandy and laudanum'.

To find out more about Queen Victoria's relationship with Melbourne, and her experience as monarch, as well as her views on the politics and literature of the day, check out the journals online here. Reading the diaries also allow us access to the language and literary conventions of the day, which are useful to writers of history and fiction alike.

Let me know what you think in the comments. And if you find anything unexpected, do share!


www.fayboundalberti.com

'This useful little book' - by Sheena Wilkinson

Second in my occasional series about charming little books from the past.

This one is a tiny waistcoat diary from 1919, found many years ago in a junk shop; I no longer remember when or where.  It was a free gift, given away by Hargreaves Brothers and Co, of Gipsyville, Hull, makers of black lead and metal polish. I often wondered about who had owned it in 1919, and what their life was like. I’ve always been interested in WW1 but especially in the immediate post-war years, when people tried to adjust to the huge upheaval of the war. 

I’ve always kept the little book in my desk; in my mind it was associated with inspiration, especially when I began to write stories about the period. I also used it as a good luck charm – I had it with me for my first proper job interview in 1994, and when I went to meet my agent for the first time in 2009. A four-leaved clover is pressed between two of its pages, and I no longer know if I put it there, or if it was there when I bought it. (Romance inclines me towards the latter, but truth compels me to say that pressing four-leaved clovers in old books is exactly the sort of thing I do.)

As with any artefact, it tells us so much more than it was ever meant to. In some ways it’s disappointing – the really interesting thing would be to find a diary that someone had written in. Only a few pages have anything hand-written and it’s of a dull listish nature and sadly illegible. But perhaps whoever owned it didn’t need it because they already had a diary. You see, this little free gift didn’t appear in time for the 1919 new year – because of paper shortages, ‘it became necessary at the end of 1917 to discontinue the issue of this useful little book… in order to comply with the instructions of the ‘Paper Commission.’

The end of hostilities in November 1918 led to the unexpected publication of the ‘useful little book’, but it starts in February. It’s as if January 1919 had been missed out. Which made me think about January 1919: a turn of year that should have been very hopeful  – the ‘war to end war’ was over, after all. But January 1919 was a time of tremendous upheaval, uncertainty and grief. There was bitter labour unrest, with cities like Glasgow and my own Belfast plunged into darkness by strikes. Demobilisation was slow and inefficient, with the first to enlist often the last to be released, leading to near mutiny. The papers thrummed with anxiety about what sort of a peace settlement would be reached. And the third wave of the great flu pandemic was rearing its head – the pandemic lasted about a year and did not really die down until summer 1919, killing upwards of 50 million people worldwide. All in all, a month many would be glad to see removed from memory, rather in the way that people at the turn of 2017, are lamenting the horrors of 2016.

Forgetting is not of course the way to make sense of painful pasts. We in Northern Ireland know that better than many. The printers of this little diary, with its pages devoted to the decorations awarded in the ‘Great European and other wars of recent years’ know that.

Now that I am writing two books set in this period – one in late 1918, one in spring 1919, this old diary has acquired yet another significance for me, as a great way to check days and dates, sunrise and sunset, etc. I can of course find the same information online, but how much nicer to use this tiny little leather-bound book, hoping that, unreadable though the ink might be, something of its essence might come through the pages, through the years, and help me and my characters on our way.

'Living With History' by A L Berridge

 

I hope I’ll be forgiven a rather longer and more personal post this month. For most of the year I seem to have been moaning about the difficulties of being a historical writer, and as the family time of Christmas looms closer it occurs to me there’s something even worse.

Living with one.

My own husband, Paul, is a hero for doing it. When he found me wandering about with a rucksack of rocks on my back and I explained I wanted to know what a 17th century hunchback felt like, he only said ‘Uh-huh,’ and went to make the tea. When he caught me crying over my computer because a young sergeant had died in the Charge of the Light Brigade, he gave me a hug. When I was trying to master 17th century rapier work and made a hole in the ceiling, he just fetched a ladder and started to mend it.

He’s not perfect. He used to help me work out fencing movements, but stopped when I was writing ‘Honour and the Sword’ and asked him to stand a little lower so I could see if I could feasibly knee him in the balls. But I’d still say he’s a hero for putting up with me, and would guess there are many others making similar sacrifices every day. 

The hardest thing, I think, is having to deal with the disengagement. The reality of cohabiting with a historical writer is that you’re living with someone who’s only half in the same world.

Here’s an example of such a writer, a diary entry from a Cambridge historian who was working on a book called ‘The Parting of Friends’, about the Wilberforces and Henry Manning:

"I was so absorbed in my work this morning that I forgot my name! When I went to the parlour for coffee, I looked at the list to tick off my name and was puzzled that I could not find it. I was looking for ‘Wilberforce’!"

I can identify with this, but I also know how irritating it is to live with. I know, because the historian’s name was David Newsome, and he was my father.

First page of the diary he kept until his death in 2004

 It is a strange thing to read your own father’s diaries, but I’m his Literary Executor and it’s part of my job. My sister Janet and I have just published some of his early lectures and articles, and the process was strangely humbling. I’d read his books, of course, but he was still 'my dad', and I’d never quite taken in what a giant he was in his own world. Academic histories don’t attract big sales figures, and although he won the Whitbread Best Biography in 1980, I hadn’t fully appreciated what that meant.

It was only when I read the quotation from A.N. Wilson we chose for our back cover that I had my first real glimpse of the truth: ‘The most engagingly readable, the most sympathetic, the most intelligent historian of the nineteenth century’.

I’d kill for a review like that.

But at the time I often found his absorption with history an irritation. We had a father who knew Cardinal Newman died on the 11th of August, but struggled to remember our birthdays. And he had always been like that. When he was doing an Officer Initiative Test on National Service, the sergeant-major apparently caught him deep in conversation about some abstruse mediaeval philosophy, said just ‘Gawd!’, and passed on. My father used to relate this anecdote with great delight, but I confess my sympathies were often with the sergeant-major.

And perhaps I was wrong.

In one of the essays we’ve reprinted in 'Historical Vignettes', he wrote of historians:

‘In order to understand the past, they must do their utmost to obliterate all thoughts about the present. They have to shed their contemporary outlook in order to immerse themselves in a relatively alien world.’

I’d bet I’m not the only one feeling a pang of recognition at that. When I was struggling with a passage on 17th century torture and a telephone caller identified himself as ‘British Gas’, I can still remember the agonizing seconds of silence while my brain was thinking ‘What???’ I was in a world where there was no such thing, no such concept, no such reality at all.

It doesn’t mean we don’t care about this world, only that at times the other is just as real. I was oddly reassured as a daughter to read this rather sad little passage in my father’s diary when my mother had taken us away for a few days:

“In the course of a dull and lonely day did 17 pages. But felt strangely depressed at times, recovered by the evening and the thought of my family returning. Had the oddest supper of cornflakes and hot milk and pork pie...”

What we want, of course, is to have both, and sometimes we try to take our families with us into the other world. I doubt I’m the only one who’s dragged her husband off the beach to plunge into a dark museum, with promises of ‘Honestly, you’ll enjoy it when you get there’. My dad did it too, but more subtly. Part of his love of history was almost nostalgic, especially for the Edwardian age, and he shared it with us all:

David Newsome, aka 'my dad

 “Afterwards we cleared the lounge so that I could dance with the children to Harry Davidson’s ‘Those were the Days!’ A superb evening with the ‘Circus Girl’ and ‘Arcadians’ and ‘Count of Luxemburg’; also ‘Hello, Hello, who’s your lady friend?’ Why do I love these things so? Part of a world that is quite gone.” (October 31st 1964)

In case it isn’t screamingly obvious, by the way, I absolutely adored my father.

 But there’s a danger in it. When we live in the hinterland, there is always a risk of the boundaries between worlds becoming blurred. Domestic priorities rub shoulders with historical ones, and we see nothing wrong in the juxtaposition of the two. One of my dad’s diary entries devotes as much space to the day’s discussions with his students (one on Hildebrand, one on Plato) as it does to the domestic upheaval accompanying my own birth.

And why not? It could go just as easily the other way, and when confronted by an incident of interest to the historians of tomorrow, my father’s attention was just as clearly fixed on the domestic:

  

“A most eventful day.  a) Lotty had her litter.  She escaped during the night, had the kittens in the pram! b) The Queen’s visit....she was very easy to talk with.  Talked about the fashion of beard growing...also said the Shah of Persia was a “very serious man”. She was dressed in pink.” (May 8th 1959) 

It’s only a problem when the two worlds overlap in our minds, and a) and b) lose their distinction. It’s at night we’re most vulnerable. We’re thinking over our current writing, but the real world intervenes to create a surreal blend of the two. My dad had long been mulling over the relative merits of Cardinals Newman and Manning, and when he was a Cambridge don this manifested itself in a dream in which Newman scored a First Class degree and Manning a lowly Third.

I’ve had similar experiences. When I was writing ‘In the Name of the King’ I was wrestling with the story question of how my hero could track down the villain who had ruined and humiliated him, and somewhere in my sleep I rejoiced to find the answer. It was only when I woke that it occurred to me it was unlikely a 17th century nobleman would have had access to Google Search.

I’ll never be in my father’s league as a writer, but I’ve inherited the irritating bits and at last I understand them. A historical writer stands with a foot in each of two worlds – and is always in imminent danger of doing the splits. I was never sufficiently sympathetic to my father, who died long before I published my own first book, but I wish I could go back now and tell him I understand. I am so very grateful that my husband does.

Which is why finally this post isn’t dedicated to my dad, but to Paul and all his fellow sufferers. To the poor partners, siblings and children of other History Girls, to the History-Widowers and History-Orphans who have to live with someone who spends half their time in a different century. We’ll all have our own stories about this, and I do hope some of the other History Girls will share theirs.

All I can say for myself to all of these victims is – Salut. You are the real heroes, and our only justification is that you must be as mad as we are to put up with it...

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A.L. Berridge's website