Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
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A fresh, witty, accessible life of Queen Victoria. Not since Lytton Strachey has the irony, contradictions and influence of this Queen been treated with such flourish or biographical insight.'Queen Victoria had a very complicated and psychologically fascinating personality and only a very talented biographer could get to the key of her character. Fortunately in Matthew Dennison's pithy, well-researched, beautifully written and very accessible book, she has found one' Andrew RobertsQueen Victoria is Britain’s queen of contradictions. In her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast; cultural imperialism and imperial compassion; fear of intellectualism and excitement at technology; romanticism and prudishness, she became a spirit of the age to which she gave her name.Victoria embraced photography, railway travel and modern art; she resisted compulsory education for the working classes, recommended for a leading women’s rights campaigner ‘a good whipping’ and detested smoking. She may or may not have been amused.Meanwhile she reinvented the monarchy and wrestled with personal reinvention. She lived in the shadow of her mother and then under the tutelage of her husband; finally she embraced self-reliance during her long widowhood. Fresh, witty and accessible, Queen Victoria is a compelling assessment of Victoria’s mercurial character and impact, written with the irony, flourish and insight that this Queen and her rule so richly deserve.

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Matthew Dennison. Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction

1

‘Pocket Hercules’

2

‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’

3

‘Constant amusements, flattery, excitements and mere politics’

4

‘Every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy’

5

‘The cares of Royalty pressed comparatively lightly’

6

‘The pain of parting’

7

‘Unavailing regrets’

8

‘A Highland Widow’

9

‘Wisest counsellors’

10

‘Mother of many nations’

11

‘All that magnificence’

PICTURE SECTION

A sentimental image of dynastic intent, William Beechey’s portrait of the infant Victoria with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, asserts her right to rule: in her hand she clasps a miniature of her deceased father

‘Striking … though not entirely correct’ was Victoria’s assessment of the first of Henry Tanworth Wells’ paintings of the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain informed her of her accession on 20 June 1837. Wells’ painting – undertaken fifty years later – is a romantic reimagining of that ‘historical incident’

In this unabashedly regal portrait of 1843, Francis Grant references only Victoria’s role as queen

A youthful Victoria is depicted in an informal setting surrounded by flowers in the second year of her reign

On different occasions Victoria dismissed official portraits of the ‘dear Being’ Lord Melbourne as ‘too old and not handsome enough’ and ‘not in my opinion half pleasing enough’. Here she attempted her own sketch of her first, best-loved prime minister

Prussian sculptor Emil Wolff depicted Albert as a Greek warrior. Victoria thought it ‘very beautiful’ but Albert later commissioned a second, less ‘undressed’ version

At the first of the three great fancy dress balls given by Victoria, on 12 May 1842 she appeared as Queen Philippa, Albert as Edward III. Her costume, here recorded for posterity by Landseer, was based on the Westminster Abbey tomb effigy of the medieval queen, on which Edward, famously devoted to his bride, lavished £3,000 in 1369

In words and pictures, the popular press dwelt on the royal couple’s conspicuous happiness and domestic bliss

In 1845, Victoria paid Franz Xaver Winterhalter £105 for this group portrait in which she appears alongside her four eldest children (from left: the Princess Royal, Princess Alice, Prince Alfred and the Prince of Wales)

Victoria’s own badge of the Order of Victoria and Albert, c. 1862–3, on which, uniquely, the position of the portraits of husband and wife was reversed

Photographs like this one, depicting Victoria with Alice and Louise and a portrait of the recently deceased Albert, encouraged some observers to discern in her mourning a theatrical dimension

In Victoria’s mind a picture of shadows – ‘as I am now, sad & lonely’ – Landseer’s famous Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866 gave rise to ribald comment on public exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1867

The windowed Victoria at one of her collection of spinning wheels, an unsympathetic image of stolidly unrelenting gloom

Victoria commissioned Tuxen’s sumptuous group portrait to commemorate the family gathering of her Golden Jubilee in 1887

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ALSO BY MATTHEW DENNISON

Copyright

About the Publisher

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For Gráinne and Aeneas, with all love

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

.....

CHAPTER 7: ‘Unavailing regrets’

CHAPTER 8: ‘A Highland Widow’

.....

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