Queen Victoria

Abstract

This book evokes the pervasive importance of religion to Queen Victoria’s life but also that life’s centrality to the religion of Victorians around the globe. The first comprehensive exploration of Victoria’s religiosity, it shows how moments in her life—from her accession to her marriage and her successive bereavements—enlarged how she defined and lived her faith. It portrays a woman who had simple convictions but a complex identity that suited her multinational kingdom: a determined Anglican who preferred Presbyterian Scotland, an ardent Protestant who revered her husband’s Lutheran homeland but became sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism and Islam, a moralizing believer in the religion of the home who scorned Sabbatarianism. Drawing on a systematic reading of her journals and an extensive selection of manuscripts from British and German archives, it sheds new light not just on Victoria’s private beliefs but also on her activity as a monarch, who wielded her powers energetically in questions of church and state. Unlike a conventional biography, this book interweaves its account of Victoria’s life with a panoramic survey of what religious communities made of it. Drawing on sermons, newspapers, and other sources from around the British world, it shows how different churches and world religions expressed an emotional identification with their Queen and Empress, turning her into an embodiment of their different and often rival conceptions of what her Empire ought to be. The result is a biography of a Queen which also argues that monarchy and religion remained close allies in the nineteenth-century British world.

The Queen's Urdu: Translating Colonial Secularity in Victoria's 1858 Proclamation

“…the neutrality of the proclamation was her achievement, after facing down efforts by Darby's government to take evangelical sensibilities into account." 14 The proclamation was dispatched to India and received by Canning on October 17. When Canning approved the proclamation's language on religion, Victoria "rejoice [d]," as she "strongly insisted on it."…”

“…(For her part, Victoria wished, as she wrote in October 1895, that "the Mahometans could be left alone by Missionaries.") 63 But the fact that missions continued after 1858 is curious. Or, stated differently, this simple fact points to a Christian exceptionalism at work: native religion was to be consigned to a private sphere, but Christianity could keep its public roles, if perhaps in a modified form.…”