The reader should not lose sight of the fact that these Journals are the simple impressions of a young girl, not twenty years old, about her own life and about the people she met. This constitutes their charm. She writes of her daily movements, and of the men and happenings that gave her pleasure. Either by nature or design, she avoided the mention of disagreeable things, so that these early Journals give one a notion of a life happily and simply led.
If they throw no new light on the history of the period, they will give to future generations an insight, of never-failing interest, into the character of the young Queen.
II
Princess Victoria’s first Journal was commenced on August 1, 1832. She was thirteen years old. The first entry is made in a small octavo volume half bound in red morocco, of a very unpretentious kind.[1] On the first page there appear the words, “This book Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it.—Victoria, Kensington Palace, July 31.”
The Duchess of Kent was at this time forty-six years of age. She had been a widow for twelve years. She was the fourth daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and was first married to the Prince of Leiningen-Dachburg-Hadenburg. He was twenty-three years her senior. By him she had one son, Charles, often mentioned in these Journals, and one daughter Feodorowna, subsequently married to Ernest, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
Two years after her second marriage, to the fourth son of George III., the Duchess of Kent was left a widow for the second time. Crippled by the Duke’s debts, that she was quite unable to pay,[2] with three young children on her hands, she was miserably poor. Her jointure yielded her an income of under £300. Her brother Leopold, then living at Claremont, came to her assistance, and made her an allowance of £3,000 a year.
In 1825, when it became evident that her daughter Princess Victoria would in all probability succeed to the Throne of England, Parliament voted an annuity of £6,000 to the Duchess, for the maintenance and education of her child, and this was subsequently increased after the accession of William IV.
The upbringing of her daughter became her absorbing occupation, and, shutting herself up in Kensington Palace, she devoted herself to the child’s education.
The lessons of Princess Victoria’s childhood were superintended by the Dean of Chester. Her education, judged by the standards of to-day, was not of an exceptionally high order. It would be interesting to know what old Roger Ascham would have thought of the Dean of Chester’s curriculum. So far as can be gathered from her own childish records and from the correspondence and memoirs of those who had access to Kensington, she was taught the ordinary things which children are supposed to learn. Fortunately, perhaps, no effort of any special kind was made to train her mind or mould her character, with a view to the responsibilities which lay before her or to the position she appeared destined to fill. When, at a later stage, the Bishops of London and Lincoln were requested to draw up a report, for presentation to Parliament, upon her moral and intellectual attainments, they found no difficulty in giving credit to the Duchess of Kent for the conscientious manner in which she had endeavoured to educate the heiress to the Throne. We may, however, take leave to doubt whether those entrusted with the Princess’s education were teachers endowed with any special aptitudes; and it is certain that the outlook of the Duchess herself, although practical and wise, was not of that discerning character which enabled her to differentiate between a commonplace education and its more subtle forms. It was precisely what might have been expected from one whose youth had been spent in a small German Court, and whose later opportunities had not brought her into contact with highly trained and thoughtful minds.
A foreign observer and critic once suggested a doubt whether the Queen could have maintained through life her admirable mental equilibrium if education had developed in her high intellectual curiosity or fantastic imagination. It is an interesting speculation. Soundness of judgment possibly rests upon the receptive rather than upon the creative faculties, and upon physical rather than upon intellectual activities. It may, as has been said, require a rare type of intelligence—that of Disraeli—to combine ideas and dreams with the realities of public life. In the domain of learning, Queen Victoria had very little in common with Elizabeth or with any Sovereign of the Renaissance. Her mother and the worthy Dean, who watched over her youth, were content to foster the quality of good sense, and to inculcate high standards of private and public virtue. Her future subjects, could they have been consulted, would have strongly approved. In after-years the English middle-class recognised in the Queen a certain strain of German sentimentality which they affectionately condoned, and a robust equilibrium of mind which they thoroughly admired.