Becoming Victoria

Choice

. . . [A]n exhaustive use of material in the Royal Archives and a judicious application of cultural and literary critical theory. . .

Town & Country

Vallone's fascinating book looks at . . . Victoria . . . who, after the festivities of her coronation day . . . gave her dog Dash a bath.

Publishers Weekly

"Exuberant," "creative" and "playful" are not words that typically come to mind when one thinks of Queen Victoria, but, as Texas A&M English professor Vallone (Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) ably demonstrates, youthful Victoria was notably different from the staid, dignified monarch who gave her name to what has often been viewed as one of the most stolid ages in modern history. By analyzing Victoria's girlhood diaries, drawings and fiction, as well as records of her education and scores of accounts of her childhood, Vallone not only constructs a revisionist account of the princess's youthful persona but also traces the process by which Victoria was molded into the "right" kind of adult: capable of assuming the throne and also a clear embodiment of all that was womanly and pure. Vallone calls this a study of both Victoria and the various ideological imperatives that undergirded early 19th-century child-rearing; the latter achievement is more compelling. Victoria is, in Vallone's account, a fascinating, complex figure. But she also serves here as an example of the way girls' personalities were subject to various social and cultural pressures en route to adulthood. And because Victoria the feminine icon was deemed at least as important as Victoria the ruler, her upbringing had much more in common with those of other girls than one might imagine. Well-researched, and with sophisticated cultural criticism, this sound scholarship will engage the interest of academics and nonacademics alike. Illus. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This pleasant read, written by a Texas A&M literature scholar and expert on 18th- and 19th-century girlhood, focuses on Queen Victoria (1819-1901) as princess. Vallone's case study in Georgian child-rearing among elites depicts the future queen's formative years, often neglected in studies of Victoria's life. When William IV became King of Great Britain in 1830, his 11-year-old niece, Victoria, became heiress presumptive. Drawing on Victoria's lesson schedules, sketches (many here reproduced), journals, surviving fiction, and correspondence with her mother, the widowed Duchess of Kent, Vallone reveals how the girl was shaped by strict education and upbringing under an obsessively controlling parent. Covering her life from birth until just after she gained the throne (June 20, 1837), the text is packed with details of Victoria as infant, girl, and adolescent, increasingly torn between inculcated loyalty to the duchess and her increasingly independent temperament. For a wide audience, especially royalty and British history buffs; recommended for public and academic libraries. Nigel Tappin, Lake of Bays P.L., Huntsville, Ont. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The childhood, youth, and education of Victoria, from cradle to coronation eve (1819–37). Vallone (English/Texas A&M) has done her homework: she examined young Victoria's journals, schoolwork, creative writing, sketches, and "Behaviour Books"—accounts of her conduct kept by her influential governess, Louise Lehzen; and she inspected the toys and prized possessions of the princess. She read (and here summarizes) the books that Victoria read—those assigned to her by family and tutors as well as those the princess read for her own edification and pleasure (including James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo and Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation). Vallone consulted books from the period dealing with child-rearing and the deportment of girls. She examined the many portraits of young Victoria, both for their accuracy and for their symbolic values. She explored the curriculum Victoria experienced—her studies of Latin, French, German, and Italian (her weakest language) and of history, literature, science, and mathematics. (Victoria, in Vallone's view, was "an able student with an active mind.") She explains Victoria's interests in riding, theater-going, singing, and dancing and presents intimate aspects of Victoria's life as well, describing her childhood willfulness, speculating about her menstrual cycle, and describing her initial encounters with her cousin Albert, who would become the love of her life. Emerging from all of this impressive research is a much more human and even humane Victoria than suggested by the later photographs of the dour, dumpy queen. The Victoria that Vallone reveals is a young woman with spirit—and a temper—with aneducation both unusual and conventional, and with a sympathy for the poor. By the time her uncle William IV died, Victoria was a competent and caring young woman ready for the role history had so improbably awarded her. Though her scholarship is impeccable, Vallone lacks any irony or humor and sometimes over-stuffs her copious parentheses; occasionally, she sacrifices freshness for familiarity (people tend to "pull punches" and "play a waiting game"). Much scholarly vigor, very little animating vim. (46 illustrations)