A Magnificent Obsession Quotes

“Yes, hers had been a magnificent obsession and Victoria had stayed true to it, exhaustively commemorating her late husband in the way she saw fit. But the true Victorian age – of pageantry, pride and empire – was never his. It was entirely Victoria’s.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“With a series of deaths in the family and her entourage, she was kept indefinitely preoccupied, turning the performance of grief into her own very personal art form.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“In the end, boosted by the assumption of her new title of Empress of India and her unrivalled supremacy over her royal relatives in Europe as ‘the doyenne of sovereigns’, Queen Victoria grew into the familiar, imposing image that has come down to us of ‘Victoria Regina et Imperatrix’.32The British monarchy retained its firm hold upon the affections of the middle classes, who could relate to Victoria and her ‘comfortable’ motherliness and, through her, ‘felt related in some degree to something that [was] socially great’ – their very own royal family. It is a sentiment that has survived into the reign of her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, a monarch whose unerring sense of duty bears all the hallmarks of the tradition set by Prince Albert. But whether it will survive beyond her is doubtful.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The real Prince Albert, whom Martin’s book and all the other written memorials to him in their slavish hagiography had failed ever to capture – ‘the real creature, so full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible, and so very human’ – had completely disappeared.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The Victoria and Albert Museum was extended piecemeal until the mid-1880s, but the main frontage – for which Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1899 – was not completed till 1909. Albertopolis reached its full incarnation with the addition of the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. But the emotive focal point would always be the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, which gave a sense of unity and identity to this ambitious Victorian exercise in Wagnerian grandeur.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Above the entrance to the mausoleum she had had inscribed the words ‘Farewell best beloved, here at last I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again’, but it was not until 4 February 1901 that she finally joined Albert there.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“In a triumphant subversion of the traditional image of the monarch in splendid robes of state at the heart of great ceremonial set-pieces, by the century’s end Queen Victoria dominated the national consciousness as its antithesis – in all her bourgeois ordinariness – as revered widow and ‘Mother of the People’, and (on an international scale) as Grandmama of Europe. It was an extraordinary alchemy, unique to Queen Victoria as monarch. For by the end of her reign there was no one to rival her in her wisdom, her years of experience and her grasp of statesmanship and international affairs.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“With time and the deaths of so many she loved, public sympathy grew for the ageing queen. The British people respected her capacity for unending sorrow; there was something majestic, almost mystical about it. Victoria celebrated the mythic power of death like a pagan queen in tune with rituals beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“As for a resumption of Victoria’s public duties, the events of 1871–2, while doing much to turn the tide of her unpopularity, did little immediately to alter the deeply ingrained habits of the previous decade. The insularity and self-absorption of those lost years had seen a hardening of her least-attractive image as the dour, prudish, humourless and repressive Widow at Windsor – an erroneous view that has come down through history, and which has marginalised the Queen’s many good attributes. These worst excesses of stubborn self-interest had indeed seen her become at times ‘maddening, cruel, hateful, pitiful, impossible’.4But out of so much darkness and negativity there finally emerged the monarch whose great virtues – lack of vanity, human sympathy, an absolute honesty and sound common sense – finally gained the ascendant in her later years.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Since Bertie’s illness she was more forgiving, learning to live with his inadequacies and appreciating better his innate kindness and affection. But for the rest of his mother’s reign the Prince of Wales had to pay the price of a life of imposed idleness – frittering away his useful years in the shallow pursuit of women, horses and gambling in the watering holes of Europe and country houses of England.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The whole congregation, as they did so, was gripped by a ‘royal silence that the sacredness of the place and the majesty of her office demanded – a real silence.’ Gavard had not been particularly impressed with the sight of the Queen: ‘fat and short…with a discontented-looking face’; but that silence – not the natural silence of the void, as he recalled, but ‘the silence of thousands of people holding their breath at the presence of the monarch finally among them’ – was quite extraordinary.61It was a ‘thrilling moment’, Munby recalled, when the organ sounded out, just as the sun broke through the clouds outside and ‘sent beams of slanting light down through the misty vault of the dome, upon the gold and scarlet and purple crowds below’. As the 250-strong choir burst into the words of the Te Deum, Lucy Cavendish, like many others, felt a shudder of recognition: ‘Never before had I realised what a Psalm of Thanksgiving it is, and most beautiful and moving were the words specially dwelt upon by the music:…“When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death”.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Animosity was whipped up once more: it was time the Queen stepped down or the monarchy was done away with altogether. Charles Bradlaugh, President of the London Republican Club, argued that ‘the experience of the last nine years proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch’, urging not violent overthrow, but a peaceful transition. After so many years of only nominal monarchy, the Act of Settlement that had established the House of Hanover on the British throne in 1701 should be revoked on the Queen’s decease.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The expectation of at least being solicited for advice had rapidly faded, and Ponsonby’s role was often reduced to the farcical sending of the same papers back and forth, via footmen, to the Queen a few rooms away. He already had the distinct impression that his monarch did not work as hard as she claimed, despite the sycophantic protection of Dr Jenner. The perception of some, like Disraeli, that she worked tirelessly on Foreign and Colonial Office dispatches in the seclusion of her rooms was a fiction, in his view. And how could she do the work of government properly at Balmoral in isolation from her ministers? Ever more entrenched in going nowhere and seeing only the few people she liked, Victoria did not even enjoy having her children around her.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The rituals of death and mourning were so much part and parcel of her life now that she found their celebration consoling. She liked to be told the deathbed details of those she knew, went to see them laid out and, when she could not, requested photographs of them in their coffins to be sent to her. Even the tragic death of Vicky’s two-year-old son Sigismund from meningitis that summer elicited requests for every last detail, which Vicky in her agony felt unable to write down. They discussed the power of sympathy and a comforting presence in their letters, but such was Victoria’s solipsism that even this exercise in condolence was more about her own than her daughter’s loss.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Duty had been the motivating force in Albert’s life, but with Victoria it was different. She wanted more; she wanted love. Without it – without Albert – all she had to cling to was her great and enduring grief. But as her family and court watched in dismay, the damage of such pathological mourning to her normal functioning as monarch was becoming ever more apparent. Her recovery was not, as one might normally expect, contingent on the passage of time, as a simple matter of ‘getting over it’. What was needed was a crucial and necessary shift in dependency, from her dead husband to a living substitute: a strong and protective male, who would look after her as Albert had done. This role now fell to the most unlikely of candidates – the blunt and down-to-earth John Brown, who after his arrival at Windsor at the end of 1864 had slowly begun to break down the incapacitating pattern of the Queen’s grief at a time when every other option had failed.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Bertie, for his part, was trying hard to be affectionate and ‘do what is right’, but Victoria still found his idleness and inattentiveness ‘trying’, as too his joie de vivre; his noisiness gave her bad headaches. She had been particularly anxious that he should be suitably ‘Germanised’ in time for his marriage, for she had been alarmed to discover that he wrote to his fiancée in English rather than his sainted father’s native tongue: ‘the German element is the one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home,’ she told Vicky. To lose it would be a betrayal of Albert; it never occurred to her that to keep it would feed into already hostile feelings about the excessive favouritism of things German by the British monarchy.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Nevertheless, it was the end of January before Victoria saw her Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, for the first time since Albert’s death. The old man was quite overwhelmed when he arrived at Osborne and could hardly speak for his tears, a fact that Victoria found unnerving when she thought of how she and Albert had so despised him in the past. But she also took comfort in it, for she liked to see others as grief-stricken as she was.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“There is no one to call me Victoria now,’ she had wept, though this is the popularly quoted version of a far more wrenching form of the loss of intimacy, as she expressed it to her German-speaking relatives: ‘I have no one now in the world to call me “du”,’ she had told Princess Mary Adelaide.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“6Having lived her life in a unique position of power as a woman – enacting, initiating, granting permission and, when she chose, withholding it – Victoria was presented by Albert’s death for the first time with something totally outside her control. She felt angry, worthless, inadequate and guilty too: that perhaps in her own self-obsession she had omitted to take her husband’s failing health seriously enough and might even, somehow, have done something to prevent it. Unending grief was therefore not just an escape from responsibilities she did not wish to shoulder alone, but also a necessary form of harsh self-punishment.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The courage needed to face up to her lonely task as monarch had, meanwhile, totally deserted her; her relationship with Albert had been crucial to her own sense of self and the way she lived her life, and without him she was rudderless. Indeed, her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others: during her childhood she had become used to incessant surveillance, imposed by her mother. She had never had to stand and act alone until the first months of her reign, after which she had quickly let go of her early promise as an active queen, to accept the guidance of a powerful man – her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Then Albert had come along and, as she was sidelined by pregnancy after pregnancy, he had assumed many of the onerous responsibilities of state on her behalf. However, it went against the grain for Victoria not to fulfil her role conscientiously, as he had so assiduously trained her, but alone as she now was, she was so mistrustful of her own judgement that it was much easier simply to give way to grief and do nothing.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“On the day after Albert died, when she had taken the Duchess of Sutherland into the King’s Room to see his body, the Queen had turned as they both looked down at Albert’s dead face and asked plaintively, ‘Will they do him justice now?’ By day’s end, 23 December 1861, there was no one in the country who could have doubted the extent to which the nation had indeed done justice to its late Prince. The day had been a great celebration, not just of the Prince, but of sober British moral values. Benjamin Disraeli had no hesitation in his own paean to the late Consort: ‘With Prince Albert we have buried our sovereign,’ he confided unequivocally to Count Vitzthum, Saxon envoy to the Court of St James’s. ‘This German prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“But it was not just the Christian community that paid homage in their churches that day. Among the Jewish community, especially of London, Prince Albert was mourned in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. The Jews, who had much to thank the Prince for his impartiality on religious matters, marked the occasion with special services in synagogues, several of them draped in black. Sermons on the dead Prince were delivered at London’s historic Sephardi synagogue (the Bevis Marks in the City) and the two Ashkenazi congregations (the Great and the Hambro synagogues). At the West London synagogue every seat was filled long before the service and the roads leading up to it were jammed with vehicles. Here the congregation heard a sermon by Dr Marks taking as its text the words of Jeremiah IX:19: ‘A voice of lamentation is heard from Zion. How are we bereaved!’ And at his own privately built synagogue on his estate in Ramsgate, the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and his wife attended a special service where the reading desk was covered with black cloth, ‘the only symbol of mourning we ever had in our synagogue’. All in all, as one British Jew later reported to a friend in South Africa, there had been ‘not a dry eye in the synagogues’; prayers for Prince Albert had continued all day. ‘The people mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better’ was his somewhat unorthodox conclusion.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“The eulogies for Prince Albert were in stark contrast to the many damning ones that had appeared on the deaths of George IV in 1830 and William IV in 1837. Previous kings, let alone prince consorts, had been nothing in comparison with him, according to the leader-writer of the Glasgow Herald, who described how the ‘gloomy Philip of Spain’, husband of Queen Mary, had been disliked, as too ‘the ‘reckless and unprincipled debauché’ Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. In comparison with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne, Albert had been a paragon.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Late that night, before he went to bed, Howard Elphinstone went in to see Prince Albert’s body. His face was calm and peaceful. Elphinstone had known all along that the Prince ‘had a fixed idea, that he would die of the 1st fever he got’, but nevertheless he was distressed that the Prince had not tried to fight his illness. ‘He had gone without a struggle, but likewise without saying a word’, to the end a stranger in a foreign land, and longing still for his beloved Coburg.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“She would later recall how often Albert had remarked on her own indomitable lust for life: ‘I do not cling to life,’ he had told her not long before his death, ‘You do; but I set no store by it. If I knew that those I love were well cared for, I should be quite ready to die tomorrow.’ More prophetically he had added that he was sure that ‘if I had a severe illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life.’ It was an awful admission to make to a wife whose physical robustness was so visible, but he had, he told her, ‘no tenacity in life.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Ever in tune with her emotions, Victoria had taken to the performance of bereavement with aplomb. This first experience in 1844 of ‘real grief’, as she put it, made a ‘lasting impression’ on her, she told Uncle Leopold, so much so that she admitted, ‘one loves to cling to one’s grief’.31Years later, in a conversation with Vicky about ensuring that even young children wore mourning, she had insisted: ‘you must promise me that if I should die your child or children and those around you should mourn; this really must be, for I have such strong feelings on this subject’.32By 1861, therefore, Victoria was already a master of the long and flamboyant mourning protocols that were in vogue, enthroning her own particular maudlin celebration of grief as a virtue to be emulated by all.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“He had been born three months after his cousin Princess Victoria, on 26 August 1819, and was delivered by the same German midwife – Charlotte Heidenreich von-Siebold – at the Schloss Rosenau, four miles from Coburg.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy

“Fires were kept blazing with beech logs in all the reception rooms – the Queen did not like the smell of coal, although her pathological intolerance of heat was such that she ordained that the rooms should be kept at a temperature of only sixty degrees and she had thermometers in ivory cases mounted on every chimneypiece in order to check that her directive was adhered to.”
― Helen Rappaport, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy