June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: Gillian Gill's 'We Two' Reassesses the Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the 'Victorian' Era
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
A cat may look at a King, and a swain's [shepherds's] eye hath as high a reach as a lord's look. -- Robert Greene, 1590
One of the world's first "power couples" -- a concept familiar to us today with the Clintons and the Obamas -- was created in 1840 with the marriage of Great Britain's Queen Victoria to her German first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Like all marriages, it was a work in progress, notes Gillian Gill in her very readable dual biography "We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (Ballantine, 480 pages, photos, notes, bibliography, $35).
It was a love match that produced nine children before it was cut short by the death of Albert at the age of 42 from typhoid fever on Dec. 14, 1861. Gill ("Nightingales") writes that the grieving 42-year-old widow -- they were both born in 1819 -- went on to reign 40 more years, until 1901, and was liberated by the death of her prince consort.
Conventional wisdom is often wrong and Gill writes that it is spectacularly so in the case of Victoria and Albert, a work that skillfully combines biography and history in a very accessible book that reminds me of the writings of the late, great American historian Barbara W. Tuchman ("The Guns of August," "The Zimmermann Telegram," "Stilwell and the American Experience in China").
Gill was born in Wales and earned her doctorate from Cambridge University in modern French literature; Tuchman combined experience in researching and journalism to produce books of history that are outstandingly accessible, like Gill's, to the general reader. Maybe writing history is too important to be left to professional, academic historians!
There's even a connection between the events Gill describes and Tuchman chronicles in "The Guns of August." Tuchman's book opens with the death of Victoria's and Albert's son and her successor, King Edward VII, whose funeral on May 20, 1910, in Tuchman's words "marked the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered and, of its kind, the last." Present at the funeral were Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, grandson of Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was married to one of her granddaughters.
Conventional wisdom tells us that Victoria was only happy when she turned over the reins of power to her husband, a classic workaholic who had a conventional, stereotypical view of women that was common to the era, but was especially pronounced in Germany.
Gill demolishes this view, showing Victoria as a tiny (she was just under five feet tall) feisty bundle of energy who wasn't about to give up her power, even to the man she dearly loved. During her long reign, Victoria was advised by some of the greatest prime ministers Britain has ever produced such as Lord Palmerston, Sir Robert Peel, Herbert John Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, but one gets the impression from Gill's book that she weighed their advice and made her own decisions. She was a hand-on queen.
Victoria and Albert pored over state papers together, with Albert almost obsessive in his urge to read everything Parliament produced. He was also the driving force behind the first world's fair, the spectacularly successful Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, that opened May 1, 1851 in an innovative glass and iron structure designed by Joseph Paxton that was quickly dubbed the Crystal Palace. Thanks to Albert's attention to detail and willingness to take chances on Paxton's design, the exhibition attracted 6.2 million ticket-paying visitors, a remarkable turnout considering that the population of Great Britain at the time was about 20 million.
Gill notes that while Victoria was extremely popular with Britons of all classes, Albert was almost uniformly hated by the upper classes and the masses alike. Albert was a detail-oriented egghead, a technocrat who could have become a professional musician, a lover of fine art who didn't smoke or drink and definitely didn't acquire mistresses like previous British rulers.
Even the style of hunting that expert marksman Albert practiced, penning up deer and other animals and shooting them at close range, something he was familiar with in his postage-stamp sized principality in Thuringia, was scorned by the upper class British. Their love of riding to the hounds in search of a fox was called in a different context by Oscar Wilde in his 1893 play "A Woman of No Importance": "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."
Albert's nationality didn't sit well with the chauvinistic Brits, in spite of the fact that their kingdom had been ruled for centuries by imported rulers, including Victoria's grandfather, George III, born in London to a mother from Saxe-Coburg. Albert was viewed, correctly, by all classes of Brits as being strongly in favor of German unification, something most people in Great Britain definitely didn't want. Before the creation of the German Empire in 1871, Germany consisted of kingdoms like Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria and dozens of principalities like Saxe-Coburg.
Gill uses the first part of the quotation about the cat looking at the king, which means that I'm as good as anyone, thank you very much, as the book's epigraph. From my experience with cats, they consider themselves superior to everyone, including kings and queens!
Since British law forbade the marriage of royal princes and princesses to their subjects, the children of Victoria and Albert contributed significantly to the dynastic marriages of Europe. Their oldest child, Victoria, called Vicky, (1840-1901) married into the Prussian royalty and one of her children became the future nemesis of England during World War I, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941). Another daughter, Alice (1843-1878) married Louis of Hesse, another German principality, and their daughter Alix became the Czarina of Russia, Alexandria, who was murdered during the Russian revolution by the Bolsheviks in 1918 along with her husband Czar Nicholas II and their children, including the famous Anastasia.
Queen Victoria wasn't as much of a stereotypical "Victorian" as her husband, a stickler for morality and protocol who was a hands-on father, even more so than Victoria, Gill writes. She was much more fun loving, enjoying trips to her country houses and palaces, including Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands, to this day a favorite of her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II. By rights, the "Victorian" era should be called the "Albertian" one, Gill says. Balmoral was loved by both Victoria and Albert, but was especially the private kingdom of Albert, who was its "laird" and achieved a measure of love and respect by his neighbors.
Both biography and history buffs will love "We Two," which I suspect will be on the short list for major prizes this year, including the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. I'm awarding "We Two" my own honor, the Barbara Tuchman History Prize, something I just made up.
Publisher's website: www.ballantinebooks.com
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BOOK REVIEW: Gillian Gill's 'We Two' Reassesses the Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the 'Victorian' Era
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
A cat may look at a King, and a swain's [shepherds's] eye hath as high a reach as a lord's look. -- Robert Greene, 1590
One of the world's first "power couples" -- a concept familiar to us today with the Clintons and the Obamas -- was created in 1840 with the marriage of Great Britain's Queen Victoria to her German first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Like all marriages, it was a work in progress, notes Gillian Gill in her very readable dual biography "We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (Ballantine, 480 pages, photos, notes, bibliography, $35).
It was a love match that produced nine children before it was cut short by the death of Albert at the age of 42 from typhoid fever on Dec. 14, 1861. Gill ("Nightingales") writes that the grieving 42-year-old widow -- they were both born in 1819 -- went on to reign 40 more years, until 1901, and was liberated by the death of her prince consort.
Conventional wisdom is often wrong and Gill writes that it is spectacularly so in the case of Victoria and Albert, a work that skillfully combines biography and history in a very accessible book that reminds me of the writings of the late, great American historian Barbara W. Tuchman ("The Guns of August," "The Zimmermann Telegram," "Stilwell and the American Experience in China").
Gill was born in Wales and earned her doctorate from Cambridge University in modern French literature; Tuchman combined experience in researching and journalism to produce books of history that are outstandingly accessible, like Gill's, to the general reader. Maybe writing history is too important to be left to professional, academic historians!
There's even a connection between the events Gill describes and Tuchman chronicles in "The Guns of August." Tuchman's book opens with the death of Victoria's and Albert's son and her successor, King Edward VII, whose funeral on May 20, 1910, in Tuchman's words "marked the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered and, of its kind, the last." Present at the funeral were Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, grandson of Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was married to one of her granddaughters.
Conventional wisdom tells us that Victoria was only happy when she turned over the reins of power to her husband, a classic workaholic who had a conventional, stereotypical view of women that was common to the era, but was especially pronounced in Germany.
Gill demolishes this view, showing Victoria as a tiny (she was just under five feet tall) feisty bundle of energy who wasn't about to give up her power, even to the man she dearly loved. During her long reign, Victoria was advised by some of the greatest prime ministers Britain has ever produced such as Lord Palmerston, Sir Robert Peel, Herbert John Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, but one gets the impression from Gill's book that she weighed their advice and made her own decisions. She was a hand-on queen.
Victoria and Albert pored over state papers together, with Albert almost obsessive in his urge to read everything Parliament produced. He was also the driving force behind the first world's fair, the spectacularly successful Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, that opened May 1, 1851 in an innovative glass and iron structure designed by Joseph Paxton that was quickly dubbed the Crystal Palace. Thanks to Albert's attention to detail and willingness to take chances on Paxton's design, the exhibition attracted 6.2 million ticket-paying visitors, a remarkable turnout considering that the population of Great Britain at the time was about 20 million.
Gill notes that while Victoria was extremely popular with Britons of all classes, Albert was almost uniformly hated by the upper classes and the masses alike. Albert was a detail-oriented egghead, a technocrat who could have become a professional musician, a lover of fine art who didn't smoke or drink and definitely didn't acquire mistresses like previous British rulers.
Even the style of hunting that expert marksman Albert practiced, penning up deer and other animals and shooting them at close range, something he was familiar with in his postage-stamp sized principality in Thuringia, was scorned by the upper class British. Their love of riding to the hounds in search of a fox was called in a different context by Oscar Wilde in his 1893 play "A Woman of No Importance": "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."
Albert's nationality didn't sit well with the chauvinistic Brits, in spite of the fact that their kingdom had been ruled for centuries by imported rulers, including Victoria's grandfather, George III, born in London to a mother from Saxe-Coburg. Albert was viewed, correctly, by all classes of Brits as being strongly in favor of German unification, something most people in Great Britain definitely didn't want. Before the creation of the German Empire in 1871, Germany consisted of kingdoms like Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria and dozens of principalities like Saxe-Coburg.
Gill uses the first part of the quotation about the cat looking at the king, which means that I'm as good as anyone, thank you very much, as the book's epigraph. From my experience with cats, they consider themselves superior to everyone, including kings and queens!
Since British law forbade the marriage of royal princes and princesses to their subjects, the children of Victoria and Albert contributed significantly to the dynastic marriages of Europe. Their oldest child, Victoria, called Vicky, (1840-1901) married into the Prussian royalty and one of her children became the future nemesis of England during World War I, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941). Another daughter, Alice (1843-1878) married Louis of Hesse, another German principality, and their daughter Alix became the Czarina of Russia, Alexandria, who was murdered during the Russian revolution by the Bolsheviks in 1918 along with her husband Czar Nicholas II and their children, including the famous Anastasia.
Queen Victoria wasn't as much of a stereotypical "Victorian" as her husband, a stickler for morality and protocol who was a hands-on father, even more so than Victoria, Gill writes. She was much more fun loving, enjoying trips to her country houses and palaces, including Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands, to this day a favorite of her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II. By rights, the "Victorian" era should be called the "Albertian" one, Gill says. Balmoral was loved by both Victoria and Albert, but was especially the private kingdom of Albert, who was its "laird" and achieved a measure of love and respect by his neighbors.
Both biography and history buffs will love "We Two," which I suspect will be on the short list for major prizes this year, including the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. I'm awarding "We Two" my own honor, the Barbara Tuchman History Prize, something I just made up.
Publisher's website: www.ballantinebooks.com
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