Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc.
Even at Queen Victoria's dinner-party--if something had been just a little different--perhaps if she'd worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin--"
Through the kindness of Lady Aberdeen, my wife and I were enabled to go with a party of those who were attending the International Congress of Women, then in session in London, to see
Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle, where, afterward, we were all the guests of her Majesty at tea.
She was a funny old thing, very fat, with a broad, red face, and black hair plastered neatly on each side of the forehead in the fashion shown in early pictures of
Queen Victoria. She always wore a little black bonnet and a white apron; her sleeves were tucked up to the elbow; she cut the sandwiches with large, dirty, greasy hands; and there was grease on her bodice, grease on her apron, grease on her skirt.
The first Nichols had been dead since the reign of King William the Fourth, the second since the jubilee year of
Queen Victoria. The remaining brace were Lord Dawlish's friend Jerry and his father, a formidable old man who knew all the shady secrets of all the noble families in England.
He declared in public that "the telephone is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw in my life." And one wintry morning in 1878
Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas Biddulph, in London, and for an hour talked and listened by telephone to Kate Field, who sat in a Downing Street office.
The papers were old and uninteresting, filled up mostly with dreary stereotyped descriptions of
Queen Victoria's first jubilee celebrations.
The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under
Queen Victoria. But like more than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even come a whisper of insanity.
During their time together at Buckingham Palace,
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert held three magnificent themed costume balls.
New exhibition
Queen Victoria's Palace opens at Buckingham Palace next month to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the famous ruler.
The
Queen Victoria boasts a range of restaurants and bars, a fitness centre, a spa, a ball room and a library.
Philip Parker of Royal Mail said: "
Queen Victoria was just 18 when she became queen and her reign lasted to the dawn of the 20th Century.
Queen Victoria - queen of Great Britain and Ireland and empress of India from 1837 to 1901; the last Hanoverian ruler of England (1819-1901)