Status Update – Victoria: Episode 3

For those of you who have been watching PBS’s new Masterpiece Theater series, Victoria, since I majored in the History of the 19th Century in college and spent my summer reading several books about Victoria & Albert and their household, I’ve been doing a little commentary about each episode after it airs to say whether it’s historically accurate or not.

So here we are at episode three…and, well, they’re not even entirely getting the names right now. Ha!

They’ve continued with this sort of romance between Victoria and Melbourne, but as I pointed out last week, that’s not even a little bit accurate, and it actually grossly misrepresents both the law of the time—which stated that a member of the royal family could not marry a British subject—and the sentiments of both Victoria and Melbourne. They were close, yes, and she probably had a little crush on him, but she wasn’t the sort to get serious ideas about a man unless he was going to be her husband, and Melbourne had a mistress with whom he was very happy.

So that bit of this week’s episode is fabrication once again.

I’m having a slightly harder time deciding how I feel about the portrayal of Prince Albert. On the one hand, Albert was about the furthest thing from a romantic that existed. That scene where he cuts his shirt to put Victoria’s flower near his heart? Yeah, from everything I’ve read about Albert and his personality, there’s no way he would do that. Sorry ladies!

Personally, I think the real Albert was way handsomer than the actor they’ve got playing him.

But I do think that the actor portraying Albert—even though he keeps falling out of his German accent—did do a good job of portraying Albert’s personality. He was, apparently, rather gruff and dour. He did contradict Victoria a lot, to the point where later in their marriage they would get into rip-roaring fights. And he was a notorious party-pooper. He didn’t like cards, as the episode portrayed, where Victoria did. He liked to be in bed by 9:00 (sort of like me) while Victoria liked to stay up all hours. And he was generally a man’s man and distrusted most women, probably because of the way his mother was forced to leave the family. They did a good, if brief, job of explaining that in this episode, but they should have gone into more detail, because it profoundly affected Albert’s life.

Anyhow, once again, everything with the servants of the house is completely made up. Except that they did steal from Victoria a lot. But she didn’t mind so much and would defend them, to the frustration of her ladies in waiting and others, because at the end of the day, for both Victoria and Albert, their true friends were their servants. They didn’t associate much or have friends amongst the rest of the British aristocracy.

So let’s see how they do with next week’s episode!