Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon
For more than a century, Queen Victoria has been viewed through a distorted historical lens. After Victoria’s death, in 1901, Reginald Brett (Lord Esher) and Arthur Benson, two eccentric, relatively minor, and fundamentally ill-suited court factotums, were assigned the task of editing the queen’s voluminous correspondence—it is estimated she wrote an average of 2,500 words each day of her adult life—for public consumption. The result: they winnowed down 460 volumes into a mere 3. After gaining access to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and growing more intrigued by what was left out and why, Ward presents the story of these men and their multilayered motivations for censoring out the all-too-human woman, wife, and mother hovering within the revered icon. This exciting and important piece of archival investigation fills in some enormous gaps in royal history and in Queen Victoria’s official biography. --Margaret Flanagan