“Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.”
Queen Victoria Extract from the Queen’s Journal, Tuesday, 20th June 1837.
“Never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright gazing as it were on unseen objects and not taking notice of me. I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter agonizing cry: ‘Oh! my dear darling!’, and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair unable to utter a word or shed a tear.
– On Prince Albert
“Today is my eighteenth birthday! How old! and yet how far am I from being what I should be. I shall from this day take the firm resolution to study with renewed assiduity, to keep my attention always well fixed on whatever I am about, and to strive to become every day less trifling and more fit for what, if Heaven wills it, I’m some day to be.
The courtyard and the streets were crammed when we went to the Ball, and the anxiety of the people to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it, and feel proud, which I always have done, of my country and of the English nation.”
– On her Coronation
“I love peace and quiet, I hate politics and turmoil. We women are not made for governing, and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations. There are times which force one to take interest in them, and I do, of course intensely”
Being pregnant is an occupational hazard of being a wife.
– Queen Victoria
“I feel sure that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all.”
“The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.”
“When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl – and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife generally is doomed to – which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage.”
“It seems to me a defect in our much famed Constitution, to have to part with an admirable Govt like Ld Salisbury’s for no question of any importance or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes.”
Comment made after Salisbury lost power to Gladstone in 1892, quoted in Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion by Helen Rappaport (2003),
Queen Victoria – A Life
Queen Victoria at Amazon.co.uk
Queen Victoria Pictures
Queen Victoria Pictures at Amazon.com
Queen Victoria Pictures at Amazon.co.uk