Victoria's Daughters Quotes

“Upper-class Victorians feared an overabundance of passion, believing it only complicated matters and, more dangerously, led to thoughts of unrealistic liaisons between persons of unequal social stations.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“life is a long sequence of sacrifices, trials and difficulties and one rarely gets what one wants.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“Victoria and Albert speedily assented. In Stockmar’s undertaking to “strengthen the good [and] subdue … the evil dispositions of our Nature,” Vicky would come through relatively psychologically intact. Her brother Bertie would not be so fortunate.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“The princess wrote to her mother of her feelings about these activities: “ … if one never sees poverty and always lives in that cold circle of Court people, one’s good feelings dry up, and I feel the want of going about and doing the little good that is in my power.” She added that “I am sure you will understand this.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“marriage would necessitate a change of religion, the still-hesitant Alix at first refused. But the otherwise impassive Nicky was nothing if not determined. The very day after Ernie and Ducky were married, the overwhelmed princess finally agreed to become both Russian Orthodox and wife of the heir to the Russian throne. Just as Queen Victoria, the preeminent guest at the festivities, was finishing her breakfast, Ella burst in on her grandmother with the dramatic announcement that “Alix and Nicky are to be engaged.” The wedding was planned for the spring of 1895, but the death of Nicky’s father changed all the elaborate arrangements, including sufficient time for Alix to become literate in the Russian language. Alix had just joined her future husband at the imperial summer palace of Livadia in the Crimea when Tsar Alexander III died on November 1, 1894. His widow Minnie, the princess of Wales’s sister, became the dowager empress; and her son Nicky the new tsar, Nicholas II. The morning after her fiancé’s accession, Alix was received into the Orthodox faith and at the same time given the new name of Alexandra Feodorovna. The imperial family decided the wedding should follow the late tsar’s funeral within the week. Like her mother’s wedding at Osborne in 1862, Alix’s was far more funereal in tone than joyous. All that saved it from complete gloom was the depth of the young bride and groom’s love for each other. During the years when Alice’s children were marrying their cousins and producing a multitude of little second cousins, Vicky had moved from the hurricane’s eye to near oblivion. Though she had been wounded by Fritz’s illness and Willy’s uncivil behavior, until June 1888 she at least had a loving and sympathetic husband to share her distress and lighten her sometimes intolerable burden. After his death, Vicky was left to face her martyrdom stripped of that unfaltering support. With her widowhood, her difficulties centered, inevitably, on the new emperor. Such was the exquisite release Willy experienced in succeeding his father to the throne that he took vainglory to new heights. To the horror of his mother and English grandmother, he jettisoned the standard symbols of mourning that were obligatory for a son in so visible a role, notably refusing to refrain from travel for pleasure. On a grander scale, in his eagerness to test his new powers, Willy made the most disastrous mistake of his early reign only two years after coming”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“reality when we are alone in your rooms without any witnesses … this dream is alone for you to know.” As Pakula notes, Vicky intelligently treated these fantasies (which continued until Willy turned seventeen) lightly in her answering letters, trying to direct her son’s passion toward his Hessian cousins. Just after their son’s eighteenth birthday, in 1877, Vicky and Fritz sent Willy to the University of Bonn. Both parents fervently hoped some of that institution’s accumulated centuries of academic merit might rub off on the future emperor. The experience would instead”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“It is said that the portions of the journal covering the years 1832-61 were preserved by an order from King Edward VII and that they were typed from the originals. Beatrice is said not to have been aware of this act. If this is true, these copied portions have not been released to the public.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“In her diary entry of June 15, the day her husband died , Vicky (Victoria, Princess Royal of England, wife of Frederick III German Emperor) wondered, 'why does pain not kill immediately?”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“After nine births of her own, Victoria was unsympathetic to any complaints her daughters had about their pregnancies, though she was still willing and indeed anxious to help at the deliveries.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“As much as Vicky loved her husband and he her, Fritz was not a man to demand anything from his august parents, not respect or even respectful treatment for his wife.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“… to make the Empire Nations one/His best was given to serve his country’s cause/Loving, high-souled, and valiant, he now lives/In death, as in earthly days, Beloved.”     There”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters

“Few things excited Queen Victoria as much as death. Mourning in all its permutations and intricacies was one of the great constants of her life, eventually becoming for the monarch something near obsession.”
― Jerrold M. Packard, Victoria's Daughters