Victoria Makes Queen Victoria Seem More Put Together Than She Actually Was
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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.”
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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.