Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household

by Kate Hubbard

Overview

Based on the letters and diaries of six members of Queen Victoria's household, Serving Victoria offers unique insight into the queen and her court. Seen through the eyes of her servants—including the governess to the royal children, her maid of honor, her chaplain, and her personal physician—Victoria emerges as more vulnerable, more emotional, more selfish, more comical than the austere figure depicted in her portraits.

We see a woman prone to fits of giggles, who wept easily and often, who shrank from confrontation yet insisted on controlling the lives of those around her. We witness her extraordinary and debilitating grief at the death of her husband, Albert, and her sympathy toward the tragedies that afflicted her household.

A perfect foil to the pomp and circumstance, prudery and conservatism that has become synonymous with Victoria's reign, Serving Victoria is an unforgettable glimpse of what it meant to serve the queen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062269911
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/30/2013
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Kate Hubbard has been a researcher, teacher, and book reviewer. She currently works as a freelance editor. Serving Victoria is her first book to be published in the United States.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

Part 1 'A queen is a very happy woman'

1 Windsor 1838 9

2 A Scandal and a Crisis 25

3 'Love rules the court' 40

4 Sarah Lyttelton: Superintendent of the Nursery 53

5 Charlotte Canning: Lady of the Bedchamber 69

6 'Gone afloat' 85

7 Osborne 98

8 In the Highlands 114

9 'The object of Education' 127

10 Departures 142

11 Mary Ponsonby: Maid-of-Honour 154

12 Glimpses of Abroad 167

13 Three Deaths 182

Part 2 'My heart is utterly and completely broken'

14 'Someone to lean on' 199

15 Henry Ponsonby: Private Secretary 216

16 Balmorality 228

17 Eastern Questions and Domestic Affairs 245

18 James Reid: Resident Medical Attendant 257

19 Randall Davidson: Dean of Windsor 275

20 Spring Holidays 292

21 Household Bothers 305

22 The Year of the Munshi 317

23 Accommodating Bipps 332

24 'A last look' 345

Postscript: After Victoria 363

Notes 365

Select Bibliography 391

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

Drawing on letters and diaries, Hubbard (Queen Victoria) follows six courtiers who served Queen Victoria during her 63-year reign as they chafe under the constraints of court life, dine and travel with the Queen, and even indulge in the occasional joke at her expense. Kindly Sarah Lyttelton, supervisor of the nursery, witnessed a monarch who compulsively controlled those around her and even saw children as an impediment to her life with Prince Albert. Beautiful, intelligent Charlotte Canning, lady of the bedchamber and an accomplished watercolorist whose work Victoria appropriated for her souvenir albums, found court life a welcome respite from her humiliating marriage. Spirited feminist Mary Ponsonby, maid-of-honor, found the Victorian court to be “ludicrously bourgeois and exceedingly dull,” while her modest husband Henry masterfully played the Queen’s complex and contradictory character to his advantage. Later in life, Victoria was outraged when her easygoing, gregarious doctor, James Reid, decided to marry; and sympathetic chaplain Randall Davidson also angered her when he counseled against publication of her inappropriate memoir of her deceased servant, John Brown. Although hardly controversial, this is an engrossing and fresh view of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch and day-to-day life at the Victorian court. 16 pages of illus. and photos. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (U.K.) (May)

Publishers Weekly

Mining the record left by six intimate Victorian servants, Hubbard (Rubies in the Snow, 2007, etc.) discovers a great deal about the British monarch, wife and mother. Discretion, self-reliance and the stamina to endure staggering periods of immobility and ennui marked the duty of the reliable courtier of stalwart Queen Victoria, who acceded to the throne at age 18 in 1837 and reigned until 1901. In this nuanced study, the author meticulously picks her way through the lives of the women and men carefully chosen to serve as Victoria's intimates over her long life: ladies of the bedchamber, maids of honor, lords-in-waiting, grooms-in-waiting and equerries, drawn from a low-aristocracy pool and serving the queen in rotation. Lady Sarah Lyttelton, a 50-year-old widowed lady-in-waiting, was new to the game in 1838, charmed by the young and still-single sovereign. She was in charge of keeping an eye on the maids of honor and making sure the new regime was not besmirched by the "doings" of the previous Hanoverians. The "frank and fearless" Victoria married her cousin Albert in 1840, and he proceeded to reorganize the household into a tight system of efficiency; soon the babies arrived like clockwork and Lyttelton was put in charge of the nursery. Charlotte Canning, an ace artist and young wife who became lady of the bedchamber, found her duties essentially companionable and social: accompanying Victoria on her open-air afternoon rides. Dining with the queen meant jawing an infinite parade of platitudes with an injunction on broaching politics. In other chapters, Hubbard highlights maid of honor Mary Ponsonby and her adviser husband, Henry Ponsonby, physician James Reid and Windsor chaplain Randall Davidson, who all endured a stultifying monotony of duty and probity, weddings and funerals, systems of etiquette and middlebrow refinement. A touching portrait of Victoria offstage and unguarded.

Kirkus Reviews

Well-written….Fascinating….Both eye opening and thoroughly engaging.

Andrew Holgate

Compelling....The rhythm of court life at Windsor or Balmoral is the backdrop to a rich human drama, a story of people existing in uneasy intimacy with the royal family.

Ben Wilson

[Hubbard has] plundered a rich vein of fascinating and often new information.

Val Hennessy

Fascinating.

Booklist

The appeal in Hubbard’s story is the excitement in an otherwise dull existence. Call it the sensuality of the stiffness….The emotional complexity is as entertaining as (and more astute than) most upstairs-downstairs soaps, even those written by Julian Fellowes.

Daily Beast

A vivid, entertaining and often comical portrait….Ms. Hubbard has achieved a real feat in writing so compellingly about life in the ‘airless bell jar,’ as she describes the court.

Wall Street Journal

Entertaining….Hubbard draws on a wealth of correspondence and diaries to weave an amusing ‘Upstairs, Upstairs’ drama.

The New Yorker

Kate Hubbard’s entertaining book, drawing on the vast pile of correspondence from ladies in waiting, maids of honour and others, paints a picture of court life that is compellingly vivid.

The Observer (London)

"Lady of the bedchamber," "Superintendent of the nursery," "Maid-of-Honour," and "Resident Medical Attendant" were some of the positions in Queen Victoria's court household. As impressive as these titles might sound, those ladies and gentlemen of the lesser aristocracy who filled them did so largely out of a sense of duty. Life in the royal household is described as "miserable," made up of "stiff dinners, ditch water and cold bedrooms." One of the queen's doctors became such a "hopeless" alcoholic he was persuaded to resign. A lady of the bedchamber, Lady Jane Ely, desperate to leave after years of devoted service and with her health broken, was roundly told that "Lady Ely's health and well being were of little consequence beside those of the Queen." She could not be spared, though it was "killing her." It is a testament to Hubbard's talent that she manages to convey why Victoria's household remained devoted to a monarch they all recognized as a selfish woman who did very little work. VERDICT Readers interested in the Victorian era and the British royal family will enjoy this well-written and remarkably interesting account of the "woeful dullness" and "loneliness" of life inside Victoria's court.—Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., MA

Library Journal