The Revealing Tale of Queen Victoria's Early Biography

In November 1839, two years into her reign, Queen Victoria announced her engagement to Prince Albert. The couple had met at Kensington Palace, and Victoria had soon proposed marriage to the handsome man she called 'an angel'.

It was a big moment for Victoria, and for the country. The engagement prompted one of the first biographies of the young Queen: Agnes Strickland’s Queen Victoria from her Birth to her Bridal.

But the book's release was a disaster. Victoria disliked it so much that she sent detailed notes on its flaws to the author, and it's thought that most existing copies were destroyed. Only a few copies survive, including one now on display in Victoria’s rooms at Kensington Palace.

Here, PhD student Gabrielle Fields explores what the book's inaccuracies meant then for the young Queen, and what they mean now for researchers. 

'Not one word of truth'

The most exciting thing about Victoria's library is her habit of creating 'marginalia' (marking a book). She did this often, to personalise a book, note a relevant passage, or – in the case of Strickland’s biography – to correct its contents.

It is particularly interesting to see what Victoria altered. To combat any notion of vulnerability or naivety, she wrote that she ‘never had a fall’, and added ‘NB, never had suffered’ from seasickness. She distanced herself from her mother, the Duchess of Kent, confirming Strickland’s assertion that the Duchess came to her first Privy Council meeting, but specified it was 'to the door only'.

Although the impassioned Victoria took issue with almost every sentence in the book, she did not finish it. The final pages of the second volume were left unopened – they are still joined together at the top. The absence of modification on these final pages is equally revealing, suggesting how much Victoria disapproved of Strickland’s version of events. A letter from her aunt, Queen Adelaide, in September 1841 explaining that if ‘the gross errors’ in Strickland’s book went uncorrected, they would ‘go down to posterity’ may have added to Victoria's anxiety about Strickland’s work.

The Whole Story...?

The longstanding trope that Queen Victoria was a passive character in her own reign is subsiding. Instances such as the pulping of Strickland’s biography – which correlated directly with Victoria’s disapproval – demonstrate that she was very much in control of the image that the public received. So can historians rely on her narration in Strickland’s biography for their research?

A long time has passed since our only source of information about a public figure was a single poorly-researched biography. In 2024, thousands of letters and all of Victoria's journals are easily accessible online, offering us more insight into her private life than ever before. We can also cross-reference Victoria’s notes with her own journal, which she began in 1832, aged 13. The first years, up until 1837, remain unedited, and are written in her own hand. But even these we must approach with caution, since they contain several fibs, oversights and sometimes puzzling sentences, which don’t quite line up with other trustworthy sources.  

On display in the first case of our exhibition Victoria: A Royal Childhood at Kensington Palace, Strickland’s biography reminds us from the beginning that telling Queen Victoria’s story is a careful balancing act.

Gabrielle Fields
PhD student
Historic Royal Palaces