The Reign of Queen Victoria

By Hector Bolitho

Queen Victoria remains one of the greatest figures in British history, not simply because of the tremendous position which she occupied for so long, but because she was in so many ways herself an extraordinary character.

From the day when as a young girl of eighteen she succeeded to the throne she showed that a constitutional monarch could still have a will of her own and that her words could make statesmen tremble.

Although Bolitho calls his book ‘The Reign of Queen Victoria’, his work is essentially a record of a remarkable woman and her husband, their personal lives and characters, rather than a political history of her reign.

It describes the childhood and youth of Victoria and Albert in alternate chapters so that the reader can see the two growing up side by side yet independently, and can trace the gradual evolution of their characters in isolation until they come together.