Kensington Palace Part Two

Gates of Kensington Palace, 2017

My previous post focused on Queen Victoria’s childhood. Though she left Kensington Palace as soon as she could after becoming Queen, its displays do offer glimpses of her adulthood.

The portrait of her at the theater, in the year she ascended to the throne, was new to me, and I absolutely love it. This is not a shy and retiring young woman. Though she’s only eighteen, she absolutely knows who she is. She needed to be strong-willed to get to this point. As Gillian Gill puts it in We Two, “while the Princess Victoria was weak , feverish, and confined to bed, Conroy and the duchess tried to browbeat her into signing a document appointing Conroy as her personal private secretary in the event of her accession to the throne.” She was only sixteen at the time. She refused to do it.

If you’d like a sharper image, which you can zoom in on, the portrait of Victoria wearing the emerald set is here at the Royal Collection Trust.

Below are a few notes on the photos of other items on display at Kensington Palace.

Mourning dress had specific stages, with the later stages allowing for a few colors. For the rules in Queen Alexandra’s time, you might want to take a look at these pages of Manners and Rules of Good Society (1913 ed).

The diamond tiaras speak for themselves.

We’ve all seen so many photos and films of Queen Elizabeth in her girlhood, but it was an altogether different and enlightening experience to see her and Princess Margaret’s dresses, and to learn that they were altered in order to last a long time.

Court dress is something I’ve mentioned in a few books. It did not always keep up with fashion, or else did so with its own special rules and additions. The gentleman’s court suit of 1780 is a good example of the level of expenditure. Even the detail shots can’t fully convey the richness and sparkle. The men gathered at the Court of St. James must have been quite a sight, no doubt vying with the ladies for splendor. Not that the ladies faded into the background. Their dresses would be embellished with diamonds, pearls, and other precious gems. The Lord Chamberlain, on the monarch’s orders, would issue rules about court dress, and these could change. However, ostrich feathers, lappets (those lace things dangling from the back of the headdress), and trains continued into the 20th century, as the 1928 dress shows. This painting of Queen Adelaide’s 1834 Birthday Drawing Room gives a good idea of a Court gathering at the time of my recent stories.

I’ve included the short video of Lady’s Holcroft’s court dress because a still photo simply doesn’t do the job. You can find several photographs of Lady Holcroft in her court dress here at the National Portrait Gallery. If you are unable to view the reel in your email, you can view it here on my website blog.

A short video of Lady Holcroft’s court dress

Kensington Palace and Queen Victoria

A view of the bedroom in which Queen Victoria was born, in 1819.

My favorite book about Queen Victoria is Gillian Gill’s We Two, which is mainly about her marriage (the subtitle is Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals), but also does a wonderful job of telling the story of how she came to be heir to the throne and what her childhood was like. The best biographies read like good fiction, and this book falls into that category.

Kensington Palace, like so many other of my London destinations, has much more to offer than one can see in a day. I focused on Queen Victoria primarily: the part of the palace in which she was born and grew up—and from which she quickly departed when she became Queen of England. She couldn’t wait to get out of the place, and, aware of her story, one can’t blame her.

Still, her mother loved her dearly, as gifts and notes attest, and while the young princess rarely enjoyed the company of other children (not to mention many of her English relatives), she did have some nice playthings. For more information about her life, I highly recommend the book. For now, I’m just going to share some bits of the world she lived in. I believe that seeing items like these give us a little better understanding of Victoria as a human being, a little girl, an adolescent. I’ll touch on her later life in another blog post.

The cards explain the photos, for the most part, but I’ll add a couple of notes. Victoria’s Uncle Leopold had been married to the Princess Charlotte, King George IV’s only legitimate child. There’s quite a bit about him in We Two, and I often wonder if, had Charlotte not died in childbirth, he would have been the same sort of Prince Consort as his nephew Albert. In any case, Leopold became the first King of the Belgians in 1831. He married again in 1832. This picture of his bride, Louise of Orléans, appeared in numerous ladies’ magazines that year.

As I’ve mentioned before, photographing works of art in museums and historic sites can be challenging, mainly because of lighting conditions. You can get a non-glare view of the painting of thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria here at the Royal Collection Trust.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

You’d think, given all the research I did for Mr. Impossible—not to mention my lifelong fascination with Egyptology—that I would have known all about the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaelogy. But I wrote that book quite a few years ago, when most of my research happened with books, and what was available online, while immensely helpful, wasn’t a fraction of what we find today.

That has to explain why it was such a surprise to discover it—by accident, no less—while looking for another museum around the corner, also part of University College London. The collection includes more than 80,000 objects. We did as much as we could in two phases, before and after lunch, and the boatload of photos below, will, I hope, give you an idea of what’s there.

Amelia Edwards, whose bust and book appear in the photo gallery, was an important source for me. The museum notes, as I realized while writing my book, that her attitude and prejudices reflect her time. This is bound to happen with research. So the trick is to aim for authenticity with hints here and there of the attitudes—because they offer important insights into the times—but to keep the not-so-pleasant stuff subdued. At the same time, I do try not to sound too 21st century, because I don’t want to jar readers out of the world I’ve created. Still, all writers reflect their times. That’s as true of me as it is of Amelia Edwards or any of the numerous other authors whose work I consulted.

As to the artifacts: The museum doesn’t have an elaborate guidebook, so the information is limited to what we (meaning my husband, under my command) could photograph, and I am not an Egyptologist, so I can’t offer further enlightenment. I can tell you one thing: Generally speaking, it’s believed that the shabtis—those little figurines—were meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife.

Again, you will find very brief videos on my Facebook and Instagram Author pages.