This will be the first of a few posts about Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire (Julia Baird 2016). What does the biographer have to work with?
It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria [1819-1901] wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words.
19th century fathers weren’t waiting outside with cigars…
Queen Victoria was born, roaring, at 4:15 A.M., in the hour before dawn on May 24, 1819. As the duchess lay writhing and breathing through contractions, His Majesty’s ministers waited in an adjoining room. The duke had forewarned them that he would not entertain them, as he planned to stay next to his wife, urging her on. As tradition dictated, these high-ranking men listened to the cries of the duchess during the six-hour labor, then crowded the room once the baby arrived, to attest that it was in fact the mother’s child.
Kids didn’t have to wait to grow up to get their OxyContin:
It was, after all, a dangerous thing to be born in the nineteenth century. Of every thousand infants, about 150 died at birth. Even then, the prevalence of measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and cholera meant that the likelihood that a child would survive to the age of five was little more than 70 percent. Children from poor, urban families who were not breastfed or were weaned too early had even slimmer chances. It was also a common practice to give infants opium to stop their crying, and many babies lost their appetite and starved as a result. Predictably, the mothers were blamed for working long days in factories and leaving their children with strangers. A piece published in 1850 in Household Words, the journal edited by Charles Dickens, attributed this practice to “ignorant hireling nurse(s)” who managed eight or nine babies at a time by keeping them drugged. Concoctions called “Soothing Syrup,” “Mother’s Quietness,” and a laudanum-based potion called “Godfrey’s Cordial” meant “the quiet homes of the poor reek[ed] with narcotics.” Karl Marx, writing in Das Kapital in 1867, described the “disguised infanticide and stupefaction of children with opiates,” adding that their parents were developing addictions of their own. Infant deaths were so common that parents insured their newborns, and were typically paid £5 if they died, a practice that was thought to encourage infanticide. By 1900, 80 percent of babies were insured.
Unrestrained by the father, who died in 1820, Victoria’s mother was inattentive when the future queen was young and then exploitative as the teenager grew close to ascending the throne:
Victoria trusted only one person: her governess. Baroness Lehzen, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor from Coburg, was an eccentric, single-minded, clever woman who dedicated her life to ensuring that Victoria would be a forceful, intelligent queen. … she was the only person who had solely Victoria’s interests at heart. … When Victoria was ill, Lehzen stayed by her side, quietly stitching doll clothes, as Victoria’s mother continued to visit friends and travel.
She knew ambition was curdling her mother’s heart, just as apprehension was gripping hers. It was now, when still a child who played with dolls, that Victoria’s seven-year battle with her mother began, one that would deeply scar her. But her prayers would change once she realized her mother was seeking to snatch away her crown before it could be placed on her head.
Her mother openly chastised Victoria, reminding her of her youth and telling her that she owed all her success to her mother’s good reputation. The woman who had insisted on breastfeeding her child and delighted in her fat cheeks had grown hard with anxious hunger for power, seduced by her own victim narrative of the long-suffering mother. She pointed out repeatedly that she had given up her life in another country to devote herself to raising a girl into a queen. Victoria soon stopped speaking to her.
[see also the 19th century parental altruism paper referenced in this chapter]
The 4’11” queen struggled with her weight:
Walking, she said, made her feel sick. Melbourne also told her to stop drinking beer, which she loved. By December, a “cross and low” Victoria found to her distress that she weighed 125 pounds—an “incredible weight for my size.”
But she set wedding dress fashion for centuries to come…
Victoria’s clothes had been carefully chosen to display her patriotism. The fabric of her dress was from the Spitalfields, the historic center of the silk industry in London, and two hundred lace makers from Devon had labored on it for months. The pattern was destroyed afterward so that no one could copy it. Her gloves were stitched in London and made of English kid. Victoria had commissioned a huge swath of handmade Honiton lace for her dress, in an attempt to revive the flagging lace industry (machine-made copies had been harming the trade).
The queen had asked that no one else wear white to the wedding. Some have wrongly interpreted her choice of color as a signal of sexual purity—as Agnes Strickland later gushed, she had chosen to dress “not as a queen in her glittering trappings, but in spotless white, like a pure virgin, to meet her bridegroom.” Victoria had chosen to wear white mostly because it was the perfect color to highlight the delicate lace—it was not then a conventional color for brides. Before bleaching techniques were mastered, white was a rare and expensive color, more a symbol of wealth than purity. Victoria was not the first to wear it, but she made it popular by example. Lace makers across England were thrilled by the sudden surge in the popularity of their handiwork.
She spent a lot of time being pregnant:
In giving Albert free rein to work alongside her as she carried nine children, Victoria was soon to discover that the clever, intellectually restless Albert was a great asset. She spent roughly eighty months pregnant in the 1840s and 1850s—more than six years in total—and even longer recovering from childbirth.
Unusually for the era, Albert was with her during her labor [with the first-born], along with the doctor and nurse.
Victoria spent two weeks in bed after giving birth, as was then customary. Her baby was brought to her twice a day when she was in her dressing room, and she watched her being bathed once every few weeks.
On Christmas Day 1840, Victoria marveled at her great luck: “This day last year I was an unmarried girl, and this year I have an angelic husband, and a dear little girl five weeks old.” When Vicky was eighteen months old, Victoria wrote she had become “quite a little toy for us & a great pet, always smiling so sweetly when we play with her.” The queen spent more time with Pussy, as she nicknamed her daughter, than was expected of her.
Why nine kids?
And so, when she found herself pregnant again just three months after giving birth, Victoria wept and raged. She did not have the aid of the natural—if imperfect—contraceptive of breastfeeding, as she refused to nurse her children as her own mother had done, and birth control was widely considered sinful. Some women tried to coat their vaginas with cedar oil, lead, frankincense, or olive oil, in the belief that this might prevent the “seed” from implanting. In 1838, many aristocrats used sponges “as large as can be pleasantly introduced, having previously attached a bobbin or bit of narrow riband to withdraw it.” But there is no evidence Victoria was even aware of such a thing. Women were also advised to have sex around the time of ovulation if they wanted to avoid pregnancy, which we now know to be precisely the time that most conceive.
Were medical professionals better informed regarding pediatrics?
Pussy became weak and unsettled when she was just a few months old, and neither Lehzen nor the wet nurse was able to soothe or fatten her. The queen wrote: “ ’Til the end of August she was such a magnificent, strong fat child, that it is a great grief to see her so thin, pale and changed.” Dr. Clark gave her ass’s milk and chicken broth with cream, which she was unable to keep down, as well as mercury-laced calomel, and the appetite-suppressing laudanum. The birth of a little brother, the boy her parents had longed for, only made little Pussy worse. The day after he was born, Victoria wrote: “Saw both children, Pussy terrified and not at all pleased with her little brother.
What about the basics?
Victoria had a “totally unsurmountable disgust” for breastfeeding. She was incensed when her daughter Alice decided to nurse her children herself, later in life, and a heifer in the Balmoral dairy was soon named Princess Alice. Victoria viewed it as vulgar, and inappropriate for upper-class women. She also believed it was incompatible with performing public duties, perhaps a persuasive argument in the days before breast pumps existed. Until commercial baby foods became widespread in the 1860s, most women in the Victorian middle class, and even aristocrats, combined breastfeeding with animal milk or mashed foods until the baby was a few months old. Wet nurses were expensive and frequently suspected of somehow corrupting their charges with dubious morals. But Victoria did not hesitate to employ them, believing it better for the child if a woman who was less refined and “more like an animal” suckled them.
Victoria’s take-away on being a mom?
Victoria was now the most famous working mother in the world. In England at the time, women who had jobs were pitied, but the 1851 census found one in four wives and two in three widows worked.
She told her daughter that childbearing was “a complete violence to all one’s feelings of propriety (which God knows receive a shock enough in marriage alone).”
She also warned her daughter against neglecting her husband or duties because of too much love for her babies. “No lady, and less still a Princess,” she said, would be fit for her husband or her position if she “overdid the passion for the nursery.” Victoria insisted that she saw her youngest children being bathed and put to bed only about four times a year.
For seven excruciating months in 1884, there had been glacial silence at the royal table. From May to November, Beatrice and her mother refused to talk to each other, instead pushing notes across the table to communicate, while their knives and forks clinked against china. The large block of ice Victoria regularly had placed on the dining tables to cool the summertime air was barely needed. It was bitterly awkward, especially given their usual closeness. Victoria’s youngest child had, to this point, shown only obedience. But now she had fallen in love with the handsome Prince Henry of Battenberg, right under Victoria’s nose.*1 When the dutiful, shy twenty-seven-year-old Beatrice confessed that Prince Henry had snatched her heart, Victoria was predictably selfish and melodramatic: “Pleasure has for ever died out of my life.” Victoria had long dreaded this moment. She had tried to prevent the word “wedding” from being uttered in front of Beatrice. She had ensured her daughter was never left alone in a room with a man and never danced with anyone but her brothers. She had delayed her confirmation. She wanted to protect her beloved youngest daughter from an institution she viewed with skepticism; after all, Victoria now claimed to hate marriage. She had adored her own, of course, but thought that incessant pregnancies were traumatic and painful, the loss of a child was an unbearable wrench, and most marriages were miserable. Her own family bore this out. Vicky was miserable in Prussia, bullied by disapproving and controlling parents-in-law; Louise had married a man suspected to be gay and had taken on a series of lovers; Alice had died in a far-off land; only the introverted Helena
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