The Victorian Era

The Reign of Queen Victoria

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901, was the longest-reigning British monarch in British history until her great-great-granddaughter overtook her in 2015. Her sixty-three years on the throne gave the era its name and most of its defining moments. To understand the Victorian era is to understand the woman at its centre, the family that surrounded her, the empire she came to embody, and the long Victorian afternoon that began when she was eighteen and ended in the first week of the twentieth century.

This page covers the principal events of Victoria’s life and reign, the political role she played, the family tragedies that shaped her, and the public image she eventually acquired. It is one of several pages on this site that examine the Victorian era from different angles; for the broader historical context, see The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview, and for the political questions that framed her reign, see Victorian Political History.

Early Life and Accession to the Throne

Victoria was born Alexandrina Victoria on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace, the only child of the fourth son of George III, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Her father died when she was eight months old, and her mother raised her under a strict and unhappy regime known as the Kensington System, a series of rules designed to keep the young princess isolated from anything the Duchess of Kent’s advisers regarded as politically unsuitable. The system was unpopular, and its restrictions made Victoria’s relationship with her mother difficult for the rest of her life.

Victoria’s path to the throne was unexpectedly direct. She was the niece of King William IV, who had no legitimate children, and she became heir presumptive when her father’s older brother, the Duke of Clarence, died in 1837. William IV died on 20 June 1837, and Victoria was awakened at Kensington Palace early the next morning to be told that she was queen. She was eighteen years old. The new queen took her name from her mother, dropping the Alexandrina almost immediately. For an account of exactly when and how she became queen, see the page on Victoria’s accession.

The Coronation and the Early Reign

Victoria’s coronation took place on 28 June 1838 at Westminster Abbey. The ceremony, which lasted nearly five hours, was attended by a crowd that included foreign royals, British peers, and the diplomatic corps. The young queen was reported to have behaved with great dignity, and her own diary, later published, gave a sharp, sometimes amused account of the day. The coronation was a public statement that the throne had passed to a new generation, and it was, in a sense, the founding ceremony of the Victorian era.

The early years of the reign were politically difficult. Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, became her close friend and adviser, but the Whig government was repeatedly defeated, and the young queen learned the limits of personal influence in a constitutional monarchy. The most pressing crises of the late 1830s and early 1840s were the Chartist movement, the Corn Law crisis, and the beginning of the great Irish famine. The young queen was deeply conservative, and her instinctive sympathies were with the aristocracy and the established church. This shaped her distrust of radical reform, of Irish nationalism, and of the kind of popular politics that would later be associated with mass democracy.

Marriage to Prince Albert

Victoria’s first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was a young German prince whom she had met when she was sixteen. After a brief and slightly awkward courtship, the two were married on 10 February 1840 at the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace. The marriage began in an atmosphere of public curiosity, and it was not without its tensions. Albert was not yet twenty, his English was imperfect, and his role in the British constitution was unclear. Parliament offered him a parliamentary annuity that was widely criticised, and his attempts to find a useful role in the public life of the kingdom were initially thwarted.

The marriage became one of the great partnerships of the nineteenth century. Victoria came to depend on Albert absolutely, and Albert became in practice the prime minister of her household, the projector of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and the principal private adviser of the Crown. The couple had nine children between 1840 and 1856, and their growing family, photographed by the new medium of photography, became the model of the bourgeois Victorian household for the rest of the century.

The Royal Family, the Court, and the Public Image

The Victorian royal family was, by modern standards, large, intimate, and enormously consequential. Victoria and Albert had nine children, and those children married into almost every royal house in Europe. By the end of the century, Victoria was known as the grandmother of Europe, and the marriages she had arranged shaped the dynastic politics of the continent for the next two generations. Her son Edward became king in 1901, her grandsons included Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and her granddaughters became queens of Norway, Greece, Spain, and Romania.

The image of the royal family was carefully managed. Albert insisted on a strict code of conduct in the royal household, and the family was photographed in formal settings by the leading photographers of the day, including Roger Fenton and the firm of Hills and Saunders. Portraits, engravings, and the new illustrated papers made the royal family the most visible family in Britain. The model of domestic, virtuous, hard-working family life that the royal household projected was copied, on a smaller scale, by the middle classes of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States.

The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny

Two great crises of the early and mid-Victorian period placed enormous strain on the monarchy. The first was the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, fought by Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia against Russia. The war revealed the inefficiency of the British military system, and the suffering of the soldiers, made notorious by the reporting of William Howard Russell in The Times, led to major reforms under the direction of Sidney Herbert, Florence Nightingale, and a small group of determined officials. Victoria and Albert were both deeply involved in the reform programme, and the queen’s letters to Lord Aberdeen and Lord Panmure show her at her most politically engaged.

The second crisis was the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the great uprising of Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company that spread across large parts of the subcontinent. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, but it was accompanied by atrocities on both sides, and it led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj in 1858. Victoria issued a proclamation to the people of India in November 1858 that became the founding document of direct British rule of the subcontinent. The proclamation, which promised equality of treatment regardless of race or religion, was aspirational rather than actual, but it shaped the self-image of the British in India for the next ninety years. For more on the empire that grew up around these crises, see British Empire in the Victorian Era.

The Death of Prince Albert and the Years of Mourning

The death of Prince Albert at Windsor Castle on 14 December 1861, from typhoid fever, was the most consequential event of Victoria’s reign after her accession itself. Albert was forty-two. Victoria was devastated. She withdrew from public life almost entirely, declined to open Parliament in person for the rest of her reign, and wore black for the rest of her life. The long withdrawal shocked the British public, and Benjamin Disraeli, who became her favourite prime minister in the late 1870s, eventually coaxed her back into public life.

The cult of Albert that grew up after his death shaped the late-Victorian landscape. The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, designed by George Gilbert Scott and decorated with sculptures and a frieze representing the continents and the great artists of history, was begun in 1864 and completed in 1872. The Royal Albert Hall, originally planned by Albert himself, opened in 1871. The Albert Memorial Clock in Belfast, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, and a thousand other monuments across the empire commemorated the prince. The elaborate code of Victorian mourning fashion that emerged in these years, with its strict stages of full mourning, second mourning, and ordinary mourning, was largely a cult of Albert, codified by etiquette books and the great fashion houses of London and Paris.

The Later Reign, 1870 to 1901

The last third of the reign saw a remarkable recovery of the queen’s public position. Victoria returned to the centre of public life in the 1870s, and her relationship with Disraeli, who became prime minister in 1874, transformed her image. Disraeli called her the Faery Queen, flattered her shrewdly, and arranged for her to be proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. The title, which had no constitutional effect at home, was a powerful statement of imperial identity. Victoria came to embody the empire in a way that no previous British monarch had done, and her later image, of a stout, dignified, white-haired old woman in black, became the human face of late-Victorian Britain.

The 1880s and 1890s brought new problems. The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the First Boer War of 1880 to 1881, the Nile Expedition of 1884 to 1885, the battle of Omdurman in 1898, and the South African War of 1899 to 1902 extended the reach of the empire and stretched the British army. At home, the Irish Question deepened, the suffrage question sharpened, and the labour question grew. Victoria’s late prime ministers included William Gladstone, whose repeated attempts to pass an Irish Home Rule Bill divided the Liberal Party, and the Marquess of Salisbury, who governed the empire with a mixture of patrician detachment and strategic realism. For the political context, see Victorian Political History.

The Golden Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee

Two imperial festivals marked the late reign. The Golden Jubilee of 1887, marking fifty years on the throne, was celebrated across the empire. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897, marking sixty years, was the most extravagant public celebration of the century. The queen attended a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, processed through London, and was the guest of honour at a vast review of troops, including contingents from across the empire, in her honour. The jubilees were not simply celebrations of the queen. They were celebrations of the British Empire and of the British sense of national destiny, and they shaped the political culture of the late-Victorian period.

The End of the Reign

Queen Victoria died at half past six in the evening on 22 January 1901 at Osborne House, her country home on the Isle of Wight. She was eighty-one years old. Her son, Edward, Prince of Wales, became King Edward VII, and the Victorian era ended. The queen was buried beside Prince Albert in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, near Windsor. The funeral was attended by the imperial family, by the prime ministers of the British dominions, and by representatives of almost every state in Europe. For an account of how the reign ended, see the page on Victoria’s death.

Legacy

Queen Victoria’s legacy is the Victorian era itself. The age that bears her name was one of the most consequential in British history, and her image dominated the culture of the period. The institutions that emerged during her reign, including the modern civil service, the modern monarchy, the modern prime minister’s office, the modern honours system, and the modern royal family as a public institution, all bear some trace of her influence. The popular image of the Victorian era, of black dresses, stiff etiquette, and elaborate mourning, comes in large part from the long years of her widowhood. The popular image of the British Empire, of a small island ruling a quarter of the world, comes in large part from her Diamond Jubilee.