Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, by Shrabani Basu. Vintage Books, 2010

By the time Queen Victoria started the last decade of her life, she had lost her beloved Prince Albert in 1861 and her Scottish personal servant, John Brown, in 1883- many people speculated that she and Brown were secretly married, they were so close. She was a sad and lonely woman. Then, unexpectedly, she found a new friend: Abdul Karim, from India.

He arrived as part of a contingent of Indians, a gift, as it were, to her for her Golden Jubilee. While a number of high ranking Indians visited England for the event, Karim was sent over (along with several others) as a servant. At first he waited at table, but he moved on swiftly. Despite a language barrier, the Queen and Karim began to communicate. He was solicitous and caring. Soon he was teaching her Hindi; soon after that he became a secretary. He took care of her correspondence and performed other duties. When they were apart, they wrote each other constantly. As they became closer, Victorian began to advance him in rank and give him valuable gifts and honors. This brought out jealously in both the servant’s quarters and the court- especially the court. He was being allowed to walk, sit, and ride with the court elite, and this made them furious. He was from the lower middle class, he wasn’t a Christian, and, worst of all, he had brown skin. Obviously inferior! He was with her until her death; the last person to be with her body before it was put into the coffin. Needless to say, the court instantly stripped him of as many things as they could, demanded all of Victoria’s letters to him and burned them on site. He went home to India.

Having read a couple of biographies of Queen Victoria, I knew much of this story already, but it was written from the court’s point of view- that Karim (known as the Munshi, a Hindi term for ‘secretary’) took horrible advantage of the Queen. But the author found Karim’s family in Karachi, and they had a trunk full of his journals. This unlocked the past and gave the Munshi’s side of the story.

Because I’d read about Victoria’s life before, I found some of the book tedious. But if you’ve not read about the Queen’s later life, it won’t be tedious. It’s a short, interesting book that shows us how some things never change. 

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Victoria the Queen, by Julia Baird. Random House, 2016

To write this new biography of Queen Victoria, Baird got unprecedented access to Royal Archives. Victoria’s daughter, Beatrice, had been left with the job of expurgating Victoria’s journals and letters and she did quite a hatchet job on them, removing anything that might cause her mother to be seen in a less than perfect light. What she didn’t realize was that someone at the Archives took a photo of each page, preserving Victoria’s words. Baird was given access to this treasure trove. This allows us to see the dichotomy that Victoria lived with in more detail than in the past; women of her day were supposed to be meek and submissive, while she ruled the biggest empire England ever had. Wives were supposed to obey their husbands, but her husband was consort and prince only and not the king. Women were pretty much seen as being sexless, while Victoria had a strong libido and enjoyed having sex (the Victorian era’s extreme sexual modesty actually came from Prince Albert, not Victoria). Women were supposed to be natural mothers; she hated being pregnant and was ambivalent about children.  She was the supreme ruler of the Empire, but didn’t believe women should be able to vote.

Most of the book is, of course, nothing new. Her reign has been well documented already. Baird’s writing style leaves something to be desired- she will be writing about one subject, then take off on a tangent like a dog going “Squirrel!”. Some things are out of chronological order, which is confusing. But I found the book mostly very interesting (I really had little interest in the details of her dealings with Parliament), despite already knowing a fair bit about Victoria. Don’t expect anything earthshaking, but rather a portrait of a complex woman about whom many myths have been woven. 

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Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household, by Kate Hubbard. HarperCollins 2012

This book was given to me by the Amazon Vine program in return for a fair review. The fact that the book was free in no way influenced my review. 

While much has been written about the life of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their royal children, not much has been put out there about the other people around them. Kate Hubbard has gone to original sources- letters and diaries- of the people who worked for her: the people who were neither royalty nor laborers, but those who occupied a stratum in the middle. Her doctors, the children’s governess, her maids of honor and women of the bedchamber, her private secretary all held titles that were considered honors but were in reality onuses. It was nearly impossible to refuse an invitation to serve at court- and serving did, in fact, have some advantages if one were just starting out and in need of some steady cash and introductions to the right people. And once Victoria liked a person, she was loathe to allow them to leave.

Victoria’s quirks made court a strange place. Hers was not a court of brilliant wit and scandals, nor was it one of jewels and balls. Victoria and Albert led a life of royal privilege combined with middle class sensibilities. Victoria dressed in what many considered a dowdy style (even before Albert’s death), she wouldn’t have any conversation around her that could possibly create offense or argument, she considered nursery games to be perfect after dinner activities, liked to have the windows open and no fires burning even in the dead of winter (not just in her quarters, but throughout whatever dwelling she was in), and saw no problem with not allowing her attendants to sit down at the theater rather than standing the whole time behind her seat, holding her things for her. In other words, court life was uncomfortable and boring. Lady in waiting was a very apt term; these women spent the vast majority of their time just waiting to see what they would be doing: walking outside with the Queen, riding with her in the carriage, playing cards. Even if she had no current task for them, they had to …. Wait, making no use of their time. Their time belonged to the Queen. It had to be the most boring job in the world; one woman bemoaned the lack of books. The men, on the other hand, sometimes got overworked. Her doctor, for instance, had to see her at least four times a day, sometimes eight. Her personal secretary had his hands full at all times, with both business dealings and the behind the scenes feather soothings that went along with living in a court where some people were the Queen’s pets and could do no wrong, while taking advantage of her.

The Victorian Era is one I’m very interested in, and Hubbard’s book has added a new dimension to what I know of it. While I knew any court would be a place of constant maneuvering for favor, it never occurred to me that it would be a boring place to be avoided at all costs! 

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