From time to time lectures were given in the evening. A 'very interesting lecture' was, for instance, given in September 1872 by the explorer and journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, 'a determined, ugly, little man -with a strong American twang', as the Queen described him.21 Also, very occasionally, the furniture in the drawing room was pushed back and the Queen, despite her lameness, enjoyed a 'nice little impromptu dance, Curtis's band being so entrainant'. 'We had a quadrille, in which I danced with Eddy!!' she wrote of one such impromptu dance in October 1890. 'It did quite well, then followed some waltzes and polkas.'22
One evening at the Villa Clara in Baveno the Queen, having asked William Jenner how he had spent his day, was amused to be told that he and Fräulein Bauer, Princess Beatrice's ugly and formidably straitlaced German governess, had joined a party climbing the Rigi. They had been mistaken for man and wife and, on this erroneous understanding, had been required to make the descent squashed closely together in a chair. Imagining the doctor and the governess thus trapped, everyone tried not to laugh until Princess Louise, then nineteen, could not control herself any longer and everyone else then burst into laughter. 'The tears ran down my cheeks,' Henry Ponsonby commented, 'which set off the Queen. I never saw her laugh so much.' When Lady Churchill innocently enquired, 'Did you find it comfortable?' the laughter exploded once more. 'My laugh was at Jenner stuffing his napkin over his mouth to stop himself, at Mary Bids [Lady Biddulph] shaking and speechless at my side and at Bids's [Sir Thomas Biddulph's] solemn face.'23
There was also loud laughter when the Queen was told by Lord Dufferin of a naive American who asked his English hostess, 'How old are you? How long have you been married? I should like to see your nuptial bed.' Amused as she was, the Queen raised her napkin to protect Princess Beatrice and the maids-of-honour who were sitting on the other side of the table.24
Upon a later hilarious occasion, this time at luncheon, an old, deaf, garrulous Admiral was telling the Queen at inordinate length how a ship which had sunk off the south coast had been raised and towed into Portsmouth. Anxious to stop the Admiral's flow of boring detail about this salvage operation, the Queen tried to change the subject by asking him about his sister. Mishearing her, the ancient mariner replied, 'Well, Ma'am, I am going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it scraped.' As the footmen in attendance withdrew behind a screen, the Queen 'put down her knife and fork, hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter until the tears rolled down her face'.[lxxviii]
One evening in April 1888 she 'laughed incessantly and was full of all the interesting people she had seen [in Berlin]'. At subsequent Ladies' Dinners she was described as talking very freely, giving her opinions 'in a most decided and amusing manner', being altogether 'so amusing', reminiscing happily about the boredom she had experienced during a performance of Handel's 'Messiah' at York Minster when she was sixteen, roaring with laughter at Bernard Mallet's description of his wife's attempting to paint at Bruges where boys had spat at her canvas and thrown stones at her, laughing heartily at dinner again three days later, and then being 'most cheerful' and in 'excellent spirits' at a subsequent dinner, 'making jokes about her age [78] and saying she felt quite young and that had it not been for an unfortunate accident she would have been running about still'.25
Nor were larger, more formal dinners always as strained as some guests found them when the Queen was in a disgruntled mood, unhappy or preoccupied. Reginald Brett, the Secretary of the Office of Works, son and heir of the first Lord Esher, told his son of a dinner in 1897:
It was really quite an amusing and pleasant dinner for me. I was two off the Queen, between the Duchess of Connaught and the young Duchess of Hesse [the Duke of Edinburgh's daughter, Victoria Melita] who is called 'Duckie' ... She was very shy at first, but we got on capitally later, and by the end of dinner there was quite a rag.
The Queen was extraordinarily vivacious, full of smiles and chaff - a most wonderful thing.26
A few months later Brett, who had by then become Lord Esher on his father's death, was again a guest of the Queen at a dinner 'which went off well':
The Queen was in good spirits and talked to me a good deal at dinner and afterwards. I was next but one to her, between Princess Beatrice and Lady Dudley. The latter looked very well, stately and young to be the mother of all those Wards! [seven of them]. A telegram [containing disturbing news about the Boer war] came at dinner and the Queen turned quite pale ... She asked me if I had seen her new portrait by Angeli, and, when I said no, had it sent for into the corridor. It is wonderfully like.[lxxix]27
After dinner in these later years the lady guests would play patience or whist while the men stood about 'at the end of the room in a very stiff way and very tiring to themselves', 'whispering discreetly'. Sometimes they would join the card games; but, according to Frederick Ponsonby, this activity was never very enjoyable, the packs 'usually being one card short', and 'no one having the least knowledge' of the rules of the game being played. Moreover, 'Lord Stafford, who was an equerry, had always been told that the danger of card-playing was that unscrupulous people looked over one's hand, and therefore held his hands so tightly under his chin that it took him nearly two whole minutes to find a card. Of course, no smoking was allowed.'28
The Queen, meanwhile, would sit in her chair, sipping coffee from a cup whose saucer was held by a page, occasionally asking someone to be brought up to speak to her and giving that 'curious, nervous laugh' of hers when a person whom she did not know very well was presented. 'About eleven the [card games] stop,' Lady Lytton recorded in 1896, 'and looks are sent across to the Queen ... When she takes her stick, as if by magic the servants outside know it and open the door and [an Indian servant] ... glides in, seizes the Queen's arm and she rises slowly, but still darts across the room when walking. At the door the Princes come and kiss her hand and then the Queen goes away and the Princesses follow. One feels very idiotic after this, and we either leave the drawing-room direct, or pass through the billiard-room where the Gentlemen of the Household remain.'29
Chapter 62
BOOKS
'I have nearly finished reading Corleone to the Queen and she has been as much thrilled by the story as if she were a girl of 18!'
One evening at Balmoral when the Empress Frederick was staying there the conversation at dinner turned to the novels of Marie Corelli which the Queen, like Mr Gladstone, much admired, maintaining that their author would rank as one of the greatest writers of her time. Her daughter, however, contended that they were utter tripe and, in a loud voice, sought support for this opinion from Frederick Ponsonby who was sitting at the far end of the table and had not heard the opinions expressed so far. Ponsonby contended that, while 'her books undoubtedly had a large sale, the secret of her popularity was that her writings appealed to the semi-educated. Whereupon the Empress clapped her hands and the subject dropped with startling suddenness. '1
Although she was by no means intellectual, the Queen was far from being as ill-read as was often supposed: Frederick Ponsonby averred that her taste in literature was 'said to be deplorable' and that 'she never liked the works of the great authors'. Yet her letters and journal entries contain numerous references to worthwhile books she had read, many of which she claimed to have admired or enjoyed.
She had been warned against reading novels as a girl; and in later life she confessed to feeling rather guilty when reading fiction. 'Read in [Bulwer Lytton's] Eugene Aram for some time while my hair was doing,' she had recorded in her diary in December 1838, 'and finished it; beautifully written and fearfully interesting as it is, I am glad I have finished it, for I never feel quite at ease or at home when I am reading a Novel, and therefore was really glad to go on to Guizot's Revolution de l'Angleterre.' She had already read Madame de Sevigne's letters, some of Racine's tragedies and Sully's memoirs. According to Lady Holland she told Guizot in March 1840 with what pleasure she had read his book. It was, so Lady Holland said, repea
ting a common fallacy, 'really one of the few books since her accession, & Hallam's [Constitutional History of Englandl] is the other, that she has read through'.2
Discouraged as she had been by her mother from reading novels, however, she confessed to having found James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans 'very interesting', though 'very horrible'; and had greatly enjoyed Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor which she had read aloud to Lehzen - there were later discovered to be no fewer than twelve copies of Scott's Rob Roy at Balmoral and thirty-two copies of his Lady of the Lake. As a child she had considered Scott her 'beau ideal of a Poet'; and, in later life, she told Lady Lytton that of all the poets whose work she liked, Scott was still her favourite.
Before her marriage she had also been impressed by George Crabbe and by Washington Irving's The Conquest of Granada; and, unlike Lord Melbourne, she had found Dickens's Oliver Twist 'too interesting'. Later she noted having finished Jane Eyre (which was 'intensely interesting, really a wonderful book, so powerfully and admirably written'), Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon and Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires as well as Northanger Abbey, Adam Bede ('such knowledge of human nature, such truth in the characters', a book which she was 'delighted to read a second time' since she liked 'to trace a likeness to the dear Highlanders in Adam'), The Mill on the Floss ('wonderful and painful'), Scenes of Clerical Life ('admirable'), Uncle Tom's Cabin, Disraeli's Coningsby and his Endymion,[lxxx] Charles Kingsley's Hypathia, Theodore Mugge's Afrija ('so intensely interesting, so poetical and romantic') and Charlotte M. Yonge's Heartsease. She began to read Trollope's Barchester Towers to her husband; but she did not like doing so: there was 'not enough romance in it' and 'the people she could not interest herself in'. She preferred Fanny Burney's Diary and Letters, Mrs Gaskell's life of Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse - 'poetry,' she said, 'I like in all shapes', though Mrs Browning's Aurora Leigh was 'very strange', 'at times dreadfully coarse' and 'an incredible book for a lady to have written'; while Samuel Johnson's poetry she found 'very hard'. Lord Melbourne agreed with her. 'Hang it,' he said. 'It's as hard as Greek.' 'I am very fond of Burns's poems,' she declared unsurprisingly. 'They are so poetical - so simple in their dear Scotch tongue, which is so full of poetry.'
She was particularly taken with Alice in Wonderland by Prince Leopold's friend, the Revd Charles Dodgson, the eccentric young mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll. She told him so and said that she looked forward to reading others of his books. He sent her a volume which had been published five years earlier, Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry.
Under Prince Albert's tutelage the Queen had begun to read fewer novels and more instructive works of non-fiction, such as Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II and Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion. But after the Prince's death she was reluctant to find time to trouble herself with history and biography, though she did tackle Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life by his Wife which she found 'full of [her] sort of interest'.3 And one day she spoke to Marie Mallet about A. J. Balfour's The Foundations of Belief. 'I must read some of it,' she said, 'but they tell me it is very difficult. I know it is beyond me. Have you read it?'
'Only partly Your Majesty.'
'Well, you must find some bit not too hard to read to me.'4
Nor did she much care for accounts of contemporary affairs. King-lake's Invasion of the Crimea she thought 'very scurrilous';5 and she described With Kitchener to Khartoum by the Daily Mail journalist, George Warrington Steevens, 'flippant', and she stopped Mrs Mallet's reading before she had finished it. She did, however, approve of the Spectator, 'a very sensible paper' and 'no longer as radical as it used to be'.6
But her greatest pleasure in her old age was in reading novels or rather in listening to novels being read to her. She expressed a particular enthusiasm for the works of Pauline Craven, a once highly popular novelist, the daughter of French emigres, whom, so she told Mrs Mallet, she 'admired more than anyone', her novel Recit d'une Soeur 'above all'. She invited Mrs Craven to Osborne and asked her to send her all her works - there were a great number of them - after having written her name in all of them.7
She also much admired the now little-read American writer Francis Marion Crawford. She enjoyed his Jaquissara 'immensely' and, even more, his Corleone, a novel set in Rome which Marie Mallet read to her in 1898 not long after it had been published. 'I have nearly finished reading Corleone to the Queen,' Mrs Mallet told her husband, 'and she has been as much thrilled by the story as if she were a girl of 18! It is quite a treat to read to anyone so keen and I have enjoyed it immensely.'8
Chapter 63
BOOKMEN
'It is impossible to imagine a politer little woman.'
Having read and greatly admired Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam - although his Holy Grail had left her 'quite bewildered'1 - the Queen asked to meet the poet who lived some fifteen miles from Osborne. Tennyson was reluctant to go: he was shy, he said, and would not know how to conduct himself. But on 14 April 1862, four months after the Prince Consort's death, he did go, taking his two sons and Benjamin Jowett, Fellow of Balliol, with him; and the visit was a success. The Queen described Tennyson as being 'very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair and a beard - oddly dressed but there is no affectation about him.' They talked about Prince Albert, of course; and Tennyson said he would have made a great king. Tears, gratifyingly, came into his eyes. The Queen asked him if there was anything she could do for him. He said there was nothing; but he would be grateful if she would shake his sons by the hand: the gesture might 'keep them loyal in the troublous times to come'.2
A meeting with the American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was not so successful. The Queen made a few complimentary remarks to which Longfellow replied that he was surprised to find himself so well known in England. 'Oh, I assure you, Mr Longfellow,' the Queen said, according to the poet's own account, 'you are very well known. All my servants read you.' 'Sometimes,' said Longfellow, 'I will wake up in the night and wonder if it was a deliberate slight.' Oscar Wilde, to whom Longfellow related this story, observed afterwards that it was 'the rebuke of Majesty to the vanity of the poet'.3 The Queen also expressed a wish to meet Charles Dickens who, as a young man, had plagued his friends with wild protestations that he had fallen madly in love with the 21-year-old Queen, whose features bore more than a passing resemblance to those of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. He would die for Victoria, he wrote in a series of letters which gave rise to rumours that he had actually become demented. He said that he had wandered forlornly about the grounds of Windsor Castle and felt 'so heartbroken at the glowing windows of the royal bedchamber that he had cast himself down in the mud of the Long Walk'. He wished to be embalmed and 'kept on top of the triumphal arch of Buckingham Palace when she [was] in town, and on the north-east turret of the Round Tower when she [was] at Windsor'.4
Since then, at the time of the 1848 uprisings on the Continent, Dickens had declared himself a republican; but this had not lessened his pleasure at having the Queen in the audience at his production of a charity performance of Every Man in his Humour at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket and at a subsequent performance at Devonshire House where one of the actors, who was required by the script to smoke a pipe, was, at Dickens's insistence, merely to pretend to do so, since the Queen, as he said, 'couldn't bear tobacco'.
Having led the applause at this performance - in which, she noted in her journal, 'Dickens (the celebrated author) acted admirably' - she was anxious to see a subsequent production of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep and offered Dickens a room at Buckingham Palace for this purpose. Dickens declined the offer, however, maintaining that, since his daughters had not been presented at Court, he did not want them to appear at Buckingham Palace for the first time as actresses. Dickens also refused to appear before the Queen as she asked him to do, after a performance of the play specially p
ut on for her at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street.
'My gracious Sovereign,' Dickens wrote to his friend, John Forster, explaining his reasons for disobeying this royal command, 'was so pleased [with the performance] that she sent round begging me to go round and see her and accept her thanks. I replied that I was in my Farce dress, and must beg to be excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress "could not be so ridiculous as that", and repeating the request. I sent my duty in reply, but again hoped her Majesty would excuse me pre- senting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own.'
It was, therefore, not until March 1870, shortly before his death, that Dickens appeared before the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Although he was unwell and had a swollen foot, the Queen did not break with convention by asking him to sit down. She herself remained standing, leaning over the back of a sofa for the hour and a half that the interview lasted.[lxxxi] She said that she had never been able to attend one of his readings from his works, hinting that he might give her a private performance. Some time before she had expressed a wish for a private reading from A Christmas Carol. He had regretted that he could not do so then; and now, giving the same excuse, he said that a mixed audience was essential for the reading's success. They spoke then of his American tour, and of such mundane matters as the servant problem and the high cost of food, education and Lincoln's dream before his assassination. As he prepared to leave she gave him a copy of her Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, inscribed 'from the humblest of writers to one of the greatest', and asked him for a set of his own works. She would like them, she said, that afternoon. At this he demurred: he would like to give her a special set, properly bound.
QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Page 53