Narrating the Victorians

Abstract

Biographical narratives intimately shape our perception of the Victorian era; we know the Victorian past through its principal ‘characters’, both historical and fictional. The very designation of the period as the ‘Victorian era’ reveals the extent to which such individual characters determine our perception of the period; the Victorian era is unmistakably the era of Queen Victoria. In part, this is due to both the longevity of her reign and the fact that her death in 1901 neatly marked the transition from the Victorian to the ‘modern’ period. But Queen Victoria’s prominence in the contemporary imagination stems from more than just dates; she exemplifies the characteristics we have come to think of as ‘Victorian’. Queen Victoria’s reign was marked by her excessive mourning for her husband, Prince Albert, which lasted from his death in 1861 until her own death in 1901. The cult of mourning that Queen Victoria inspired is at least partly responsible for the popular perception of the Victorians as serious and straight-laced, a perception encapsulated in the attribution to Queen Victoria of the saying ‘We are not amused’. Similarly, Queen Victoria seems to epitomize ‘Victorian’ attitudes towards sex. She is commonly credited with dispensing the advice that married women should ‘lie back and think of England’ and claiming that lesbianism did not exist. While the attribution of these opinions to Queen Victorian has been debunked in scholarly circles, as indeed has the more general perception of the Victorians as prudish and repressed, these anecdotes neatly fit the contemporary perception of the Victorian era, and confirm Queen Victoria’s position as the representative of the age to which she gave her name.¹