Baird’s writing style is engaging, yet I never felt that she was compromising historical facts in order to dwell in maudlin speculation (though she came dangerously close when writing about Victoria’s relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown). I have no time or patience for writers such as Daisy Goodwin, whose recent novel, Victoria, and the accompanying PBS miniseries about Victoria’s life, are really nothing more than a gaudy charade of history that panders to the unsuspecting and uncaring. I have nothing against entertainment, but why distort the facts of a life and the character of a person that was already colorful enough? Victoria is not a minor historical figure and there is so much known about her and her life that it seems irresponsible and ridiculous to misrepresent her for the sake of trying to please a modern audience.
Baird points out the contradictions that shaped Victoria’s life. Unlike the steadfast and principled Albert, Victoria was a woman of spirit and feeling - which means she was often inconsistent and hot-tempered. She didn’t support women’s suffrage, yet she clamored for political control throughout the course of her reign. She was happily married, but came to decry the institution. She worried over her children and loved them, but that didn’t keep her from saying cruel things about them, having favorites, or disguising feelings of disgust or disrespect for a number of them. She was personally kind and compassionate, advocating for animal rights and worrying about individual’s feelings, and she was remarkably open minded about equality and race for her time period, yet she stubbornly refused to acknowledge or intervene in some of the greatest human rights atrocities of her age.
One area that I think Baird should have further examined was the parallel between Victoria’s actions and temperament in later years and that of her mother’s. Victoria had chaffed under and rebelled against her mother’s control when she ascended the throne, yet she was a domineering presence in her own children’s lives, even going so far as to try and keep her youngest daughter from marrying. Just as power hungry John Conroy had controlled and manipulated her mother, so Victoria was seen as being over reliant and brainwashed by her close servants, especially John Brown and Abdul Karim. Victoria detested Conroy just as her own children deplored her two closest advisors.
Finally, I thought Baird’s claim that if Albert had lived longer the age might well have been known as the “Albertine Age” was an intriguing one. Morally unmoving and staunch in his views, meticulous, scholarly, driven, and a tiring advocate for social reform, I think Baird makes a strong case that Albert is the one who embodied our conception of Victorian prudery and progress, much more so than Victoria.
Baird’s biography is refreshing (and hopefully will be more widely read than Goodwin’s novel) in that she manages to be entertaining without drama-mongering.
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