Victoria Makes Queen Victoria Seem More Put Together Than She Actually Was
ITVJenna Coleman as Queen Victoria in ITV’s Victoria.
ITV’s Victoria is a historical drama centered around the life of Queen Victoria beginning with her ascension to the throne at age 18, starring Jenna Coleman as the titular Queen and Tom Hughes as her husband, Prince Albert. Unlike The Great, Victoria tried to portray history more accurately.
But despite referencing the real Queen Victoria’s extensive diaries, there are still a number of things that the show gets wrong.
One plot point of the series involves Victoria’s affection for Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, one of her main allies. In the show, Victoria is in love with Lord Melbourne and considers marrying him at one point.
But as Time acknowledges, the real Lord Melbourne was 40 years older than Victoria and far less attractive than Rufus Sewell, the actor who plays him.
“Victoria’s frank, vivid and detailed account makes it abundantly clear that she didn’t fancy Melbourne, let alone contemplate marrying him,” wrote English historian Professor Jane Ridley in The Telegraph.
Even Coleman’s casting paints an image of Queen Victoria that is far different from the real monarch. Reportedly, the royal was a “short, vulgar-looking child,” who stood under 5 feet tall and had a stout figure.
Coleman is contrastingly slender and stands a bit taller at 5’1″, and she is generally much more poised in her portrayal.
The show also depicts Victoria as being annoyed by Albert at first, likely because it’s more dramatic than love at first sight. That said, sometimes real life is simply much more straightforward than television.
“Victoria fell madly in love at first sight,” Ridley said. “She wrote ‘Albert is beautiful’ in her diary. He was much less excited, though.”
ITVTom Hughes and Jenna Coleman in Victoria as Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.
Ridley also acknowledged that Victoria “took little interest in the starving poor,” though the show features a plotline in which she intervenes to pardon Newport Chartists who were to be hung, drawn, and quartered for rebelling.
In real life, the rebel leaders were initially sentenced to death but later sent to Australia after a national campaign helped secure their release. But the Queen never personally intervened to help them herself.
And according to TV show reviewer James Delingpole of The Spectator, the scene where the Queen hallucinates a group of rats materializing on a giant cake, causing her to go into hysterics as people wonder whether she may have inherited George III’s madness, is baseless.
“Nor, I don’t think, was there an occasion where her favourite maidservant stole jewellery in order to satisfy the needs of an audience which still hasn’t quite got over the demise of Downton Abbey,” Delingpole writes.
Given that Queen Victoria kept extensive and detailed diaries, it does seem like Victoria often sacrificed historical accuracy for the sake of drama.
Sigmund Freud Did Not Go On Supernatural Mystery-Solving Adventures Like He Did In Freud
NetflixRobert Finster as a young Sigmund Freud.
In 2020, Netflix released the eight-part series Freud, a historical thriller about the famed neurologist Sigmund Freud — except in this version, he’s a cocaine-addicted witch hunter who uses hypnosis to solve mysteries.
So, right off the bat, almost everything about this show is historically wrong.
Per a review from The Guardian, the show begins with a young Freud anxiously practicing hypnotism in the hopes of proving his worth at his academy and doing cocaine, presumably to calm himself down.
But midway through the episode, any pretense of historical accuracy is thrown out the window when two inspectors throw the mutilated body of a sex worker onto Freud’s desk. Freud uses this as an opportunity to look further into his idea of an embodied, active unconscious — and offers to help the inspectors figure out who killed the unfortunate victim.
Later on, the fictionalized Sigmund Freud attends a seance where a woman named Fleur Salome “suffers a bad trip into the alternate realm, one haunted by a blood-stained demon.” She is also evidently susceptible to Freud’s hypnotism, so she becomes a patient of his — and his lover.
A couple of episodes later, it is revealed that the criminal Freud is hunting is “Countess Sophia, whose hypnotic powers dwarf Freud’s and rely on a psychosexual combination of touch and verbal manipulation.”
According to a different review of the same series from the Daily Dot, “The show bears so little resemblance to reality that comparing the fictional Sigmund Freud to the real one feels like a fool’s errand.”
If there is any historical accuracy to be found in the show, it is that the real-life Freud did have an addiction to cocaine, according to PBS.
But did he possess magical hypnotic powers and go up against a sexually-charged villainess in a battle for the fate of Vienna? No.
