Forum

Seven contemporary commentators whose experience has been touched by Queen Victoria's history and its legacy, address the question: 'How do you curate Queen Victoria now?'. 

Introduction. Queen Victoria's Self-Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation and Empire

Introduction to lay out the structure and contents of the 'Queen Victoria's Self-Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation and Empire' edition of '19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century'. 

Afterword

This Afterword reflects on the special issue's accomplishments and on prior studies of Queen Victoria in local and global contexts, and it suggests directions for future scholarship.

Queen Victoria at the Pictures

Queen Victoria was enthusiastically taken up by the shows, exhibitions and lectures that blossomed in the nineteenth century. This collaborative essay demonstrates the way Victoria's life and reign was embraced by the moving-image and projected-image formats that proliferated during the period, particularly touring panoramas, magic lantern shows and early film. Victoria and Albert were themselves intermittent visitors to these new pictorial shows in London, while, across both nation and empire, local communities were able to participate in key royal events thanks to their replaying and broadcasting by media such as the magic lantern and early film.

Queen Victoria’s "Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands": Illustrated Print Culture and the Politics of Representation

QueenVictoria published her first Highland memoir in 1867, a sentimental narrativeof royal life dedicated to Prince Albert entitled Leaves from the Journal ofOur Life in the Highlands.  Inresponse to the popularity of this edition, the publisher Smith, Elder and Co.released a lavishly illustrated edition in late 1868 to capitalize on theChristmas gift book market.  It featuredseventy-nine illustrations after works by various artists andphotographers.  When scholars have turnedtheir attention to the Queen’s journal, they have produced rich andsophisticated discussions of gender, monarchy, and celebrity, especially asthey relate to royal domesticity in the Scottish Highlands.  Yet these readings have rarely extended tothe illustrated version of the text. This article will consider the conjunctionof monarchy, the Scottish Highlands, and illustrated print culture in theillustrated Leaves through two different types of images:  steel plate engravings after watercolors bythe artist Carl Haag and wood engravings after watercolor sketches of Highlandgames by the Swedish artist Egron Lundgren. Each positions the male Highlander as a central figure in constructingthe dynamic of royal family life, sovereignty and empire.  Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have recentlyexplored what it meant for the British to be “at home with the Empire,” asking“Was it possible to be ‘at home’ with an empire and with the effects ofimperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such anentanglement?” In the course of this article I will argue that theseillustrations constructed the male Highlander as a site of familiarity withinthe bounds of the nation, while simultaneously signaling his otherness andproximity to the more far-flung reaches of empire.   As a result, Leavesis as much about empire as it is aboutdomesticity, even as it eschews direct references to current events of theperiod that directly threatened both.   

Enduring Victoria: Iconoclasm and Restoration at the British Embassy in Tehran

The Government Art Collection (GAC) shares British art, culture and creativity through displays in UK Government buildings worldwide. It is the most widely distributed collection of British art, displayed in 129 countries where it is seen by thousands of visitors each year, and makes an important contribution to UK cultural diplomacy. New acquisitions continually develop the diversity of representation within the collection to better reflect contemporary British society.The Collection holds a number of portraits of Queen Victoria that are displayed in UK diplomatic buildings in Moscow, Paris, Tehran, Tokyo, Tunis, Washington and New Delhi, amongst others.  Over two centuries, these portraits have silently witnessed Britain’s changing position in the world while recalling her former influence. The first part of this article will focus on George Hayter’s portrait of Queen Victoria, painted 1862-63, and displayed in the British Ambassador's residence in Tehran, Iran. This is one of many autograph copies of the artist’s original 1838-40 coronation portrait, currently on display at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. It features an unusual Persian inscription and was commissioned specifically for the new embassy building in Tehran, completed in 1875, shortly before Queen Victoria was entitled Empress of India, and has been displayed there ever since.The second part of the article will reflect on the display of art recently installed in the British Ambassador's Residence in Tehran, and the curatorial challenges this presented in a country with a long and troubled relationship with Britain. This new display was itself a consequence of an iconoclastic attack on Victoria’s image in 2011 when the embassy was stormed by Iranian protesters - the latest event in a turbulent history.At a time when the UK is having a profound national conversation about how it engages internationally, can Victoria’s image help to build cultural relations in diplomatic spaces or is it only a relic of an imperial past?

A Tale of Two Statues: Memorialising Queen Victoria in London and Calcutta

The Victoria Memorial in London and the Victoria MemorialHall, Calcutta, are the two most substantial and enduring commemorative schemesbuilt following the death of Queen Victoria on 23 January 1901. Both memorialsremain heritage icons, immediately recognisable parts of the urban fabric ofLondon and Calcutta. The original schemes are nonetheless notable for the imperialmyth-making and the way they place Victoria as the focal point of British rule.Moreover, both schemes foreground the question of the nature of Victoria’sagency and fashioning in relation to commemoration and hero-worship. Thestatues of Victoria by Thomas Brock at the heart of both memorials are part ofmuch grander and elaborate reshaping of the political and urban landscape, butthe commemoration of Victoria in Britain and India reveals some of thefrictions and instability around her legacy.        

'Unmistakeably Visible:' Queen Victoria in Frith's "Marriage of the Prince of Wales"

When William Powell Frith was asked to paint the marriage of Prince Albert and Princess Alexandra in 1863, it was impressed upon him that the “great object with the Queen herself” was that she be “unmistakably visible” in the composition. In this paper, I offer a close reading of the resulting painting and its reception, arguing that Victoria’s decision to commission the picture from Frith lent a very particular set of contexts to the form and content of her visibility. In 1863, Frith was at the height of his fame for this modern life subjects, Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day and The Railway Station. By commissioning the “successor” to this series, Queen Victoria placed herself quite deliberately into the very visible context of “modern life,” both in the painting and at the Academy. In Frith’s ingenuous composition, Victoria sits high above the crowd, clearly visible to the viewers of the picture, presiding over her citizenry and the continuation of her dynasty, even if within the space of the picture itself only the loving few can see her. Represented as both aloof from and fully present within the contemporary moment, Queen Victoria is unmistakably visible both as the vigilant monarch and the secluded widow. (This paper is part of the special issue edited by Michael Hatt and Joanna Marschner.)