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Queen Victoria

Who was Queen Victoria?

Queen Victoria reigned in Britain from 1837-1901. This time is also called the Victorian era.   She ruled with her husband, Prince Albert, until he died in 1861. They had nine children.

Victoria was queen for 64 years . Until September 2015 she was the longest-reigning monarch that Britain ever had; that record is now held by Queen Elizabeth II .

Eight of her nine children married other royals in Europe, so some people call Victoria the ‘grandmother of Europe’ . She was a very popular queen for most of her reign.

Top 10 facts

• Victoria was queen from 24 May 1837-22 January 1901 – that’s almost 64 years!
• Victoria’s full name was Alexandrina Victoria.
• Victoria’s mum and her mum’s friend, John Conroy, set up strict rules that Victoria had to follow as she grew up – these rules were called the Kensington System.
• Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, in 1840.
• Victoria and Albert had nine children, including Prince Albert Edward who became King Edward VII after Victoria died.
• Albert died in 1861 from typhoid fever, and Victoria never stopped mourning for him; she wore black clothes for the rest of her life.
• Victoria was queen during the time with the British Empire expanded to include India . She became the Empress of India in 1867.
• Christmas traditions such as buying a Christmas tree and sending cards became popular thanks to Queen Victoria and her family!
• Victoria died on 22 January 1901, and is buried with Prince Albert at Windsor Palace.
• Queen Victoria is Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-grandmother.
• 24 May 1819 Victoria was born at Kensington Palace in London to Prince Edward and Princess Victoria Mary Louisa (the Duke and Duchess of Kent)

• 20 June 1837 William IV died, and Victoria became queen
• 28 June 1838 Victoria’s coronation took place at Westminster Abbey
• 15 October 1839 Victoria and Albert were engaged
• 10 February 1840 Victoria and Albert were married
• 21 November 1840 Princess Victoria was born
• 9 November 1841 Prince Albert Edward was born; he would later become King Edward VII
• 13 June 1842 Queen Victoria took a train from Slough to London, becoming the first monarch to travel by train.
• 25 April 1843 Princess Alice was born
• 6 August 1844 Prince Alfred was born
• 25 May 1846 Princess Helena was born
• 1846 Victoria and Albert bought Balmoral Castle
• 18 March 1848 Princess Louise was born
• 1 May 1850 Prince Arthur was born
• 1851 Prince Albert helped plan the Great Exhibition
• 7 April 1853 Prince Leopold was born
• 14 April 1857 Princess Beatrice was born
• 14 December 1861 Prince Albert died from typhoid fever
• 1 May 1876 Queen Victoria was given the title Empress of India
• March 1871 The Royal Albert Hall opened, built to honour Prince Albert’s wish to have a place where people could learn about and enjoy the arts and sciences

• 1887 Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee
• 1897 Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee
• 1899 The South Kensington Museum was renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum
• 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died

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Did you know?

• Victoria was born at Kensington Palace, but made Buckingham Palace her home. Buckingham Palace is where Queen Elizabeth II lives now.
• Victoria’s first name is actually Alexandrina, but she always went by her middle name (Victoria). Her mum called her Drina.
• Victoria was very short – she was under 5 feet tall.
• The rules Victoria had to follow when she grew up were called the Kensington System. These rules were very strict – she was not allowed to sleep in her own room (she shared a room with her mum), and she wasn’t allowed to have other children around to play with.
• Victoria didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Her best friends growing up were her dolls, and her dog, Dash. Victoria had 132 wooden dolls!
• Victoria loved to draw and paint, and she was also good at music and maths. Victoria’s mum was German, so she grew up speaking both English and German.
• Victoria kept a diary for most of her life and wrote about the things that she did both growing up and after becoming queen. It’s through reading those diaries that we know about the sort of person Victoria was.
• Victoria met Prince Albert when she was 17.
• Imagine your mum waking you up in the middle of the night to tell you that you are the new queen of England! That’s what happened to Victoria when she found out her uncle, King William IV died. She was 18 years old.
• Albert Edward
• Victoria and Albert’s son, Albert Edward, became king after Victoria died in 1901. He is better known as King Edward VII.

Browse through the gallery and see if you can spot some of the following:

• Kensington Palace
• Balmoral Castle
• A statue of Victoria in Bath
• A sketch of the Queen
• Victoria's bathing machine, kept at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight
• A Franz Winterhalter portrait of Victoria
• Statues of Victoria

Victoria’s mum and her mum’s friend, John Conroy, came up with a list of very strict rules that Victoria had to follow as she grew up. This was called the Kensington System (after Kensington Palace, where they lived). It included things like having Victoria watched all the time, even when she was sleeping – she had to share a room with her mum and wasn’t allowed to have her own room. She couldn’t walk down the stairs without someone holding her hand, and she didn’t really play with other children. This was all done so Victoria would learn to depend on her mum and John Conroy, and maybe give them important roles after she became queen. But, it all went wrong – after Victoria became queen, she sent John Conroy away and gave her mum rooms that were far away from hers at Buckingham palace, so they hardly saw each other.

During Victoria’s life, there were seven times when someone tried to kill her! She survived all of them.

Victoria met Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha when she was 17. She was a few months older than Albert, and he was her cousin. They became friends and fell in love. After Victoria became queen, she decided to propose to Albert in October 1839 because she was worried that he wouldn’t know if it was proper to propose to a queen. They were married on 10 February 1840. Prince Albert wasn’t allowed to take the title of King, but Victoria involved him in the decisions she had to make. They even shared the same office, each with their own desk.

Eight of Victoria and Albert’s nine children went on to marry into other royal families around Europe. Because of this, Victoria is sometimes called the ‘grandmother of Europe’! By 1901, Victoria had 42 grandchildren and 37 great-grandchildren. One of her great-great-grandchildren is Queen Elizabeth II!

Victoria and Albert enjoyed celebrating Christmas very much. Prince Albert was from Germany, and carried on holding some of the Christmas traditions he was used to. These included having Christmas trees – before this time, people in Britain would have just hung a bit of holly or mistletoe rather than bring a whole tree inside and decorate it. Queen Victoria sent Christmas cards, and people began doing the same. Victoria and Albert also had a special red and gold sleigh that Albert would drive around in the snow.

Prince Albert was very involved in organising the Great Exhibition in 1851. He was interested in all the latest things to do with the arts and sciences, and celebrating the many discoveries and inventions of the Victorian era.

Prince Albert died in 1961 of typhoid fever. He was just 42, and Queen Victoria was very sad. She wore black clothes for the rest of her life to show that she was in mourning for his death. She didn’t really go out in public until quite a few years after he died. When she died in 1901, she had some of Albert’s things put in her coffin – his dressing gown, and a plaster cast of his hand.

Famous friends:

Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg Gotha (1819-1861) – Born in Germany, Albert was Queen Victorian’s husband, and Prince Consort of Britain. He died of typhoid in 1861, and Victoria wore black mourning clothes for the rest of her life. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) – Prime Minister in 1868 and again from 1874-1880; Queen Victoria liked Disraeli very much, and the two were good friends John Brown (1826-1883) – a servant of Queen Victoria’s at Balmoral Castle in Scotland; he and Victoria were very good friends, and he helped Victoria through the time when she was sad about the death of Prince Albert Baroness Lehzen (1784-1870) – Victoria’s governess from Germany, who was both her teacher and advisor

Related Videos

Just for fun...

• Watch Horrible Histories videos about Queen Victoria:  Queen Victoria - Mambo No.10 ,  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's Love Song and the  Tricky Queen Vicky Song
• Read a comic about Queen Victoria's life
• Dress up as a Victorian with a Queen Victoria mask and sceptre and a Prince Albert mask and moustache
• Take this quick quiz about Queen Victoria
• Download an activity sheet and colour in your own picture of Queen Victoria
• You'll find activities, clips and photographs in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Scrapbook
• Read extracts from Queen Victoria's diaries
• At age 10 Victoria created a story about a girl called Alice Laselles as an exercise in English composition and wrote it in a notebook. The story is now kept safe in the Royal Archives, but you can read the published version,  The Adventures of Alice Laselles

Best children's books about Queen Victoria

Find out more

• Watch a BBC Bitesize guide to Queen Victoria for KS1 children
• Read some children's historical fiction set in Victorian times
• Queen Victoria for kids : an overview
• An introduction to Queen Victoria and her life
• Download a resource which charts Queen Victoria's family relationships and her claim to the English throne
• Information about Prince Albert from the Kiddle Encyclopedia
• Artefacts from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's wedding , including a picture of their cake and cake boxes containing actual pieces of 167-year-old wedding cake from the Wedding Breakfast in 1840!
• A description of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's nine children
• Find out how  Queen Victoria popularised our Christmas traditions
• See Victoria's bathing machine , which she used to swim on the Isle of Wight
• Look through the complete online collection of Queen Victoria's journals from the Royal Archives , including her childhood diaries
• The BBC guide to how Victoria redefined Britain’s monarchy
• Download Queen Victoria's family tree
• See pictures of all Victoria's palaces and the royal households
• Queen Victoria and photography : Victoria was the first British monarch to have her life fully recorded by the camera, and the portraits of her as a wife, mother, widow and sovereign became emblematic of the Victorian age
• Examine Victoria's family photographs to find out more about her life and reign
• Look at Franz Xaver Winterhalter's official portrait, The Royal family in 1846 , and find out why Victoria liked it so much
• See a watercolour of Queen Victoria's arrival in Paris on August 1855

See for yourself

• Find out what Victoria’s childhood was like by visiting Kensington Palace
• See Balmoral Castle , which Victoria and Albert bought in 1848
• Look through artefacts from Victoria's life , including jewellery, photographs, medals and documents
• Check out Queen Victoria’s train coach at the National Railway Museum in York
• The Isle of Wight was one of Queen Victoria's favourite holiday spots. Follow in her footsteps by downloading a Queen Victoria-themed Isle of Wight tour map
• See photographs of the Royal Family on the terrace of Osborne House in 1857 and a photo of Queen Victoria and John Brown in 1868
• At the V&A in London, eight characters including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert guide you on an exciting treasure hunt to uncover some of the secrets of the Museum
• There are 78 statues of Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom, and another 56 around the world !  

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10th April 2020

Queen Victoria

Victoria was the Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Empire from 1837 until she died in 1901. In 1840, she married her cousin Prince Albert, who passed away in 1861. She mourned his death for the rest of her life. Victoria was Queen during a time where technology was advancing, railways were being built and new businesses were being set up like wildfire.

Victoria’s mother was extremely protective, and came up with a list of rules called the “Kensington System”. The aim of these rules was to make her weak and dependent on her parents.

It meant she couldn’t meet with anyone her mother or father disapproved of, or go anywhere without her mother, tutor or her governesses. Victoria couldn’t meet any other children, and her mother and John Conroy monitored and recorded every action. Her mother slept in the same room as her.

During her childhood, she studied German, Italian, French, Latin and Greek, as well as reading, writing, poetry and religious scripture.

In 1836, Victoria’s uncle, Leopold, wanted her to marry Prince Albert. Leopold and Victoria’s mother arranged for Albert and his relatives to visit them in May that year. After meeting Albert, she said in her diary:

He is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful. Extract from Victoria’s diary, May 1836

But King William IV didn’t want Victoria to marry Albert. Instead, he wanted her to marry Prince Alexander from the Netherlands. However, when Victoria met him, she thought he was “very plain”.

Becoming Queen

Less than a month after her 18th birthday, William IV died, and Victoria was the Queen. On her first day, she was called Alexandrina Victoria, as that was her first name, but she wanted to be called Victoria instead. Victoria didn’t know much about politics and constantly asked the current Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, for advice.

The first two things Victoria did as Queen were personal: she requested her bed be taken out of her mother’s room and ban Conroy (her mother’s secret lover, who came up with the Kensington System) from her apartments.

In 1840, Victoria married Prince Albert, and no longer lived with her mother (girls, even Queens, had to live with their mothers until they were married.) Over the next twenty years, Victoria and Albert had 9 children.

Empress of India

In 1857, the British Empire took over the running of India from the British East India Company after a rebellion that same year, and the company ceased to exist a few months later. Just over 20 years later, in 1876, the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli pushed a law through Parliament that would give Victoria the title “Empress of India.”

Albert’s death

In December 1861, Albert started to feel very unwell, and died later that month. Victoria was devastated and wore black for the rest of her life. For every day after he died, she got servants to lay out her husband’s clothes. We don’t know exactly why she did this, but it was probably to help her grieve.

Later life and death

Victoria lived for such a long time that she was able to celebrate her Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Queen Elizabeth II is the only other monarch to have ever celebrated these milestones.

In early January 1901, she felt very weak and unwell. On 22nd January 1901, she died at 6.30pm in the evening.

• DIGITAL MAGAZINE

MOST POPULAR

The Victorian Era Primary Resource

Learn all about this period of amazing inventions and discoveries.

This history primary resource explores Britain’s Victorian period in a fun, colourful comic. Join max the mouse on his time-travelling journey to discover the significant events that occurred during this exciting period in British history. When was the Victorian era? How did the British empire expand during Queen Victoria’s reign? What were the ground-breaking inventions of the Victorian era?

Pupils will learn about the key social, political and cultural changes that occurred during Britain’s Victorian period in this National Geographic Kids history primary resource.

The teaching resource can be used in study group tasks for discussion about the Victorian era and 19th century Britain, It could be used as a printed handout for each pupil to read themselves, or for display on the interactive whiteboard, as part of a whole class reading exercise.

Activity : In the same way that Queen Victoria dedicated monuments to her husband Albert, ask pupils to design a monument dedicated to someone they love or feel inspired by. They could also design their own postage stamp/s, inspired by their favourite people, places and things. Once finished, get the children to present their work to the class, or write a short description explaining their designs.

N.B.  The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the  English National Curriculum  and  Scottish Curriculum for Excellence . We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including  South Africa ,  Australia  and  New Zealand . If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email:  [email protected]

This History primary resource  assists with teaching the following  History objectives  from the  National Curriculum :

• Know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world.
• Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

National Curriculum Key Stage 1 History objective:   

• Pupils should be taught: significant historical events, people and places in their own locality
• Pupils should be taught: the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements. Some should be used to compare aspects of life in different periods [for example, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong]

National Curriculum Key Stage 2 History objective:

• Pupils should be taught a study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066

This History primary resource  assists with teaching the following  Social Studies Second level objective  from the  Scottish Curriculum for Excellence :

• I can discuss why people and events from a particular time in the past were important, placing them within a historical sequence
• I can compare and contrast a society in the past with my own and contribute to a discussion of the similarities and differences

Download primary resource

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When did attending school become mandatory?

It wasn't until 1880 that schooling became mandatory. All children had to attend a school until they were 10 years old. In 1889 , the school leaving age was raised to twelve, and in 1891 , the school's pence fee was abolished and schools became free.

What were the schools like?

There could be as many as 70 or 80 pupils in one class, especially in cities. The teachers were very strict. Children were often taught by reading and copying things down, or chanting things till they were perfect.

In many Victorian schools pupil-teachers helped with the teaching. The pupil-teachers were boys and girls of 13 and over. After five years of apprenticeship they could themselves become teachers.

What did the schools teach?

Typical lessons at school included the three Rs - R eading, W R iting and Dictation, and A R ithmetic.  In addition to the three Rs which were taught most of the day, once a week the children learned geography, history and singing. The girls learned how to sew.

Schools did not teach music or PE in the way that schools do now. Children sometimes did 'drill' in the classroom. Drill was a series of exercises that were done by the side of a desk.

For maths lessons, children used frames with coloured wooden beads, much like an abacus.  Children learned how to multiply and divide using this apparatus. 

What was a Victorian school day like?

The day usually began with prayers and religious instruction. Morning lessons ran from 9a.m. to 12p.m.  Children often went home for a meal, then returned for afternoon classes from 2p.m. to 5p.m.

Why did Victorian children write on slates?

Paper was expensive. Children usually therefore wrote on slates with slate pencils. After a lesson was completed, and the teacher checked their work, the students cleared their slates for the next lesson. 

Did Victorian children use pens?

Older children learnt to write on paper. An 'ink monitor' distributed ink to the children, who used pens made out of thin wooden sticks with steel needles.  The pen had to be dipped every few words or it would run dry.

Other websites

School Life In The 1800s . Web Quest

What were Dame Schools?

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