Volume 34, Number 7 · April 23, 1987
The Brass-Tacks Queen
By David Cannadine
Victoria: An Intimate Biography
by Stanley Weintraub
Dutton/Truman Talley Books, 704 pp., $26.95
The last British monarchs who gave their names to their times were Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. But whereas the word 'Edwardian' merely defined a decade, the adjective 'Victorian' conjured up an age—when God was an Englishman, when Britannia ruled the waves, and when the pound was indeed a sterling currency. Presiding over this era of providential and predestined progress was the queen-empress herself, whose life became the embodiment of her times. At her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, she was rapturously acclaimed as the bourgeois Gloriana, the fairy queen of a gaslit realm, whose reign had marked and moulded an era of unprecedented national improvement and unrivaled imperial expansion. Appropriately enough, nothing became the Victorian Age like the ending of it: no woman in history has ever been mourned by so many people as the 'great white queen.' After her death, the British were never so certain of themselves or of their destiny again.
Review, 2825 words
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