The Victoria Letters: The official companion to the ITV Victoria series

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

FIRST EDITION

Text © Helen Rappaport 2016

A Mammoth Screen/Masterpiece Co-production for ITV

Television series, photographs and ‘Victoria’ logo © Mammoth Screen Limited 2016. All rights reserved.

Victoria series photography by Gareth Gatrell

Cover photography © Billy & Hells

All other images © see here

Design © Smith & Gilmore

All quotes in grey text featured at bottom of pages are taken from the fictional Victoria television scripts written by Daisy Goodwin.

All interviews with cast and crew supplied by Alison Maloney, with the exception of those with Daisy Goodwin, which were supplied by Helen Rappaport.

Transcripts of Victoria’s journals, containing all original stress and emphasis, can be found at

www.queenvictoriasjournals.org

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.

With thanks to Patrick Smith

Helen Rappaport asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9780008196837

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008196844

Version: 2016-09-17

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

House of Hanover Family Tree, 1714–1837

LITTLE DRINA

FROM KENSINGTON PALACE TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE

THE MAIDEN QUEEN

LORD M

THE GERMAN PAUPER

HER MAJESTY’S HOUSEHOLD

THE COURT OF QUEEN VICTORIA

THE WELFARE OF MY PEOPLE

BECOMING A MOTHER

BEHIND THE SCENES

Cast List

Picture Credits

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

BY DAISY GOODWIN

WHO WAS QUEEN VICTORIA? The image most of us have is of an old lady in a bonnet dressed in black, the woman who is immortalised in countless statues all over the country. Until this year, she was our longest reigning monarch, coming to the throne in 1837 when she was eighteen and reigning for sixty-three years until her death in 1901. Photography was invented in the early years of her reign, but the first images of Victoria and her husband Albert were taken in the 1850s, when Victoria was already a mother of nine, so we have no photographic record of the young Victoria, the teenager who on the morning of 20 June 1837 woke up to find that she was the queen of the most powerful country in the world. But we do have records of her diaries, which have left behind an indelibly vivid picture of the passionate strong-willed girl. Here she is writing about Albert shortly after their engagement, ‘I just saw my dearest Albert in his white cashmere breeches, with nothing on underneath!’, or after their first parting, ‘Oh how I love him, how intensely, how devotedly, how ardently! I cried and felt so sad. Wrote my journal. Walked. Cried.’

I first came across Victoria’s journals when I was at university studying nineteenth-century England, and I was immediately taken by the girl that sprang out of the pages. Many years later when I had a teenage daughter of my own, I had a row with her one morning and it suddenly struck me that she was pretty much the same age and size (five foot nothing) as Victoria when she became Queen, and then I thought, what would happen if she woke up one morning and found that she was the most famous woman in the world? From that moment on I started writing scenes in my head, and the idea for Victoria the TV series was born.

From the beginning I wanted to show Victoria as a girl who had to do her growing up in public. Most of us get to make our adolescent mistakes in private but Victoria had to do everything under the scrutiny of her courtiers, the press and the public. There were no royal spin doctors in those days, and when Victoria made mistakes, and she made some serious ones in the early years of her reign, there was no press office to hide behind. There were plenty of people who thought that an 18-year-old girl could not be an effective monarch.

But it is clear when you read Victoria’s own words that she was a woman with an extraordinary sense of her own identity. Despite having every aspect of her early life controlled by her mother and her mother’s advisor Sir John Conroy, Victoria was not moulded by them. From the moment she came to the throne she was determined to do things her way. To take one example, as a baby she had been christened Alexandrina Victoria after her godfather, Alexander of Russia, and her mother Victorine; as a little girl she was called Drina by her mother and her governess Lehzen. But on her accession she decided that instead of taking a ‘queenly’ name like Mary or Elizabeth, she wanted to be called Queen Victoria – this was shocking at the time because the name Victoria was completely new, but Victoria, my heroine, knew instinctively that it was the right name for her. In that sense at least, she created the Victorian age.

I have used the girl that springs out of Victoria’s diaries and letters as the basis for the character that Jenna Coleman plays with such skill in the series. I hope that watching the show will make people curious about Victoria, and this book, so brilliantly put together by the nineteenth-century expert Helen Rappaport, is the perfect place to start if you want to know the history behind the series.

I hope that the series and this book will show that Victoria is very much a heroine for our times. In many ways she is the first woman to have it all – her struggles to be a wife and mother as well as a queen resonate across the centuries. She wasn’t perfect but she was brave and resolute and a great deal more than an old lady in a bonnet.

~DAISY GOODWIN, SCREENWRITER OF VICTORIA

INTRODUCTION

THE HEART AND MIND OF A YOUNG QUEEN

‘All trades must be learned, and nowadays the trade of a constitutional Sovereign, to do it well, is a very difficult one.’

– King Leopold to Queen Victoria –

– 16 January 1838 –

FEW MONARCHS IN BRITISH HISTORY have been so extensively written about as Queen Victoria. Like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, it seems that nothing can dim our enduring fascination with her or our hunger for new film and TV dramatisations of her life. Much like her two charismatic Tudor predecessors, Queen Victoria has been the subject of endless interpretation and re-evaluation, and one might think there is nothing new left to say, no new revelations to be made.

Until now, most dramatisations have concentrated on the older, more mature queen, and in particular on her life after Albert, as a widow. But in this new eight-part series for ITV, screenwriter Daisy Goodwin has put the Queen’s very first faltering steps as monarch under the microscope.

‘This book, Mamma gave me’

– Victoria –

ON 31 JULY 1832, the first page of the story of Victoria’s long life was written, when as a 13-year-old princess and already Heir Presumptive to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she inscribed the flyleaf of the shiny new red leather journal presented to her by her mother:

This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales.

~ VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 31 JULY 1832

Over the next 70 years, what began as an educational exercise in recording the relatively mundane events of her young life, to be submitted for daily inspection to her governess and her mother, would grow into 141 handwritten volumes – probably the greatest and most enduring personal record written by any queen at any time in history.

Beginning with her first childish observations of people, places and events, young Princess Victoria recorded a detailed description of her daily life at Kensington Palace, her love for her dolls and her dog Dash; and spoke poignantly of her isolation from the outside world. On her accession in 1837, and moving to Buckingham Palace, she filled the pages of her journals with fascinating accounts of the people who made the greatest impression on her (notably her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne), her hopes and aspirations about the onerous responsibility of becoming Queen that had been thrust upon her very young shoulders, and the joy of finding love and a happy marriage, so rare in the dynastic scheme of things.

In tandem with her diary, Queen Victoria’s enormous output of letters dating from 1832 chart a queen in the making and show her wrestling with some of the challenging political issues of her day and making her first difficult decisions as monarch.

This book, in tandem with the television series, tells the touching and intimate developing story of the young princess who became Queen in 1837, based closely on her journals and letters and featuring many key quotations from them. The Victoria Letters reveals at first hand a view of the queen who became our second-longest-reigning monarch after Queen Elizabeth II, with all her quirks and foibles, her impetuosity and her compassion.

~ HELEN RAPPAPORT, JUNE 2016

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