Is there anything left to say about Queen Victoria? A.N. Wilson has found plenty

Do we really need a thumping new life of Queen Victoria? She seems to be one of our most familiar figures, the subject of countless books; but the surprising fact is that there hasn’t been a full, authoritative study since Elizabeth Longford’s life of 1974. A.N. Wilson has spent many years thinking and reading about Queen Victoria, and this superb revisionist biography is the book that he was born to write.

In Wilson’s view there are two Victorias. The young Victoria was always someone’s pawn, trying to be a person that she wasn’t. She was in thrall first to Lord Melbourne and then to Baron Stockmar and Prince Albert. Only after Albert’s death was she able to become her true, strong-minded self.

Most writers have been drawn to the drama of Victoria’s youth and her love affair with Albert. This is the period of the queen’s life which Wilson finds least interesting. The first third or so is the weakest part of the book. Victoria disappears from view for pages at a time, as Wilson explains the Whigs and Tories or the Crimean war. Important episodes such as the Bedchamber Crisis are rushed over.

His account is revisionist, nonetheless. Victoria was brought up in seclusion by her German mother, the Duchess of Kent, at Kensington Palace, and she remembered her childhood as being lonely and unhappy. Her biographers have repeated this, but Wilson contends that Victoria invented the story in order to justify her harsh treatment of her mother. Whether or not the Duchess maltreated her daughter — and the jury is still out on this — she was certainly a tiresome, rather stupid woman, and once Victoria came to the throne she ditched her. Wilson has seen hundreds of letters written by the Duchess, brimming with maternal love, and on this basis he argues that the Duchess was incapable of cruelty towards her adored child.