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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
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Source ISBN: 9780008196837
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008196844
Version: 2016-09-17
CONTENTS
House of Hanover Family Tree, 1714–1837
FROM KENSINGTON PALACE TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE
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