Williams, Edward, 105
attitude towards Mary Shelley, 109
cremation, 116
death, 115–16
ill-fated sailing expedition, 112–14
liaison with Jane, 104
observes Percy’s distress over Allegra’s death, 111
Williams, Jane
affair with Hogg, 137
becomes Jane Hogg, 139
friendship with Mary Shelley, 126–27, 132–33, 151
liaison with Edward, 104, 105
Percy’s attention to, 109
pregnancy, 137
spreads lies about Mary Shelley, 139–40
Wolff, Adeline Drummond, 172
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 3–5, 4, 8, 24
women
authors, 127–28, 150, 155, 174
education for, 150, 174
feminist writings, 4–5, 150
societal roles, 27, 153
tarnished reputations, 27
Wordsworth, William, 41
“year without a summer” (1816), 53–54
Y
York, Duke of, 144
Young Frankenstein (movie), 175
PROLOGUE
Long Live the Queen!
GAWKERS FILLED LONDON’S streets, blocking traffic. It was impossible to get a horse-drawn cab “for love or money,” griped one highborn lady. People shoved; carriage drivers grew cross and shouted. “The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise, are indescribable,” a man wrote in his diary. The city was “all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing.” It was June 28, 1838. Four hundred thousand people had poured into London to celebrate the crowning of Queen Victoria.
The young queen herself had gone to bed the night before with a sense of foreboding, “a feeling that something awful was going to happen.” Cannons firing a salute yanked her from sleep at four that morning. A few hours later, after nibbling at breakfast, she stepped out under a clearing sky and into a coach pulled by horses the color of clotted cream. She hoped no one would notice her fatigue or nerves.
At ten o’clock, trumpets blared and eyes turned toward the palace. The state procession was getting under way. Foreign ambassadors rode first, followed by government ministers and the sprawling royal family. The next twelve coaches carried the queen’s attendants and behind them marched soldiers and military officers. Bands played and the crowd hurrahed, despite being held back by armed policemen. Then the spectators caught sight of the queen.
They saw a tiny girl just nineteen years old. She wore a robe of white satin and red velvet. She had large blue eyes and a circlet of diamonds atop her brown hair. Victoria bowed to the left and right. She smiled at admirers waving their handkerchiefs and hats. The coronation was to be both solemn and showy, an age-old ritual and a gala affair. Victoria had ascended to the throne on June 20, 1837, upon the death of her uncle King William IV. Her coronation, a formality, had taken a year to plan.
The coronation procession departs for Westminster Abbey. Queen Victoria rides in the company of a lady in waiting.
The throng let out a roar when Victoria reached Westminster Abbey, the historic church where, since 1066, the nation’s kings and queens had been crowned. More cheers erupted as she stepped inside: “God save Queen Victoria! Long live Queen Victoria! May the Queen live for ever!”
No queen lives forever, but Victoria was to reign for a very long time: sixty-three years, seven months, and two days. Victoria was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch until September 9, 2015, when Queen Elizabeth II broke her record. Her subjects knew her as a girl on the cusp of womanhood, then as a busy working mother, and too soon as a heartbroken widow. In time, images of the mature queen—short and round, wearing a lacy veil and tiny crown—were everywhere. They graced magazines, postage stamps, and packages of soap and tea.
Queen Victoria (left) enjoys a cup of cocoa while traveling by train in this nineteenth-century advertisement.
The years Victoria sat on the throne, from 1837 until 1901, are remembered as the Victorian age. It was a period of great change, when steam power and factories turned agricultural Britain into the industrial leader of the world. One after another, railroads crisscrossed the land, linking cities and villages. Most people traveled overland by coach or on horseback when Victoria became queen; by the 1890s, twenty-nine trains left for London from the northwestern city of Manchester every day. Industrialization shook up society, bringing wealth and status to many people and poverty and dislocation to many others. Prosperous families in houses packed with heavy furniture form one picture of Victorian life. Ragged mothers and children huddled in London doorways make up another.
During the Victorian era, British authors gave the world such unforgettable characters as Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge, Black Beauty, and Alice, the girl who went down a rabbit hole. Scientific progress forced people to question their beliefs. If the great diversity of life on earth had evolved through natural selection as Charles Darwin proposed in 1859, even religious faith had to be reexamined.
Queen Victoria stood for continuity in this shifting, uncertain time. She was an example of strength and patriotism when the nation went to war. Her support of Britain’s fighting men endeared her to many. She championed British progress in technology. She was also the subject of scandal.
Victoria reigned over an empire that spanned the globe. The British claimed possessions in the Americas, Africa, India, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. For good reason people said of Great Britain, “On her dominions the sun never sets.” The colonies enriched the mother country. They provided raw materials for British factories, tea for porcelain teacups, and sugar to sweeten it.
The days when kings and queens waged their own wars, made their own laws, and ordered beheadings were long gone when Victoria was crowned. She enjoyed limited power. She could advise the members of Parliament, but they made laws and set policy. It was her role to be above party politics, to be fair and considerate in her dealings with others.
Passengers crowd London’s Paddington Station. People learned to rely on the speed and convenience of rail travel during Queen Victoria’s reign.
In 1898, Canada issued a postage stamp showing the British Empire spanning the globe. Beginning in 1867, the Dominion of Canada became a self-governing nation but remained part of the empire. Today Canada belongs to the Commonwealth of Nations, an organization of fifty-three independent states, most of which once made up the British Empire.
Victoria tried to be the queen her nation expected, but it was hard for her to live in the public eye. She had trouble controlling her fiery emotions. Time and again she erupted in reckless anger or gave way to torrents of tears. There were days when she exasperated everyone: her family, government leaders, and the British people. She never did anything halfway. When she fell in love, she did so with her whole heart and soul. When she grieved, it was as though sorrow flowed through her body instead of blood.
Yet she also had great stamina. Even when she felt sad enough to swear that she could not go on, she always did. She was rarely ill and gave birth to many children with little difficulty, at a time when childbirth was painful and dangerous. Many women died after having babies, often from infection. She could accomplish a great deal of work and withstand the mental strain of crises at home and abroad. “The vein of iron that runs thro’ her most extraordinary character enables her to bear up to the last minute, like nobody else,” said Lady Sarah Lyttelton, her children’s nurse.
“People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality,” observed Bishop Randall Davidson, who served in the chapel at Windsor Castle during Victoria’s reign. “It may seem strange, but it is true that as a woman she was both shy and humble. . . . But as Queen she was neither shy nor humble and asserted her position unhesitatingly.”
Despite her premonition from the night before, nothing awful happened on her coronation day. Life, with all its joys and hard lessons, stretched before Victori
a like a long, rolling palace lawn. And when the festivities were over, she went home and gave her little spaniel, Dash, his bath.
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About the Author
CATHERINE REEF is the award-winning author of more than forty nonfiction books for young people and adults, many of them biographies on influential women in history, including the highly praised Florence Nightingale. She lives in College Park, Maryland.
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