Albert And Victoria

The official companion to the second season of the PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria by award-winning creator and screenwriter Daisy Goodwin. Airing in the Downton Abbey slot on PBS/Masterpiece last January, Victoria captivated millions of viewers, eclipsing Downton's first-season viewership and leaving its audience eager for the series's next season, which will focus on Victoria and Albert's passionate and tempestuous marriage. This official tie-in to the show, by creator and screenwriter Daisy Goodwin, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show, featuring never-before-seen interviews, photos, diary entries, profiles on all major characters, and sumptuous detail on the costumes and props that bring Victoria and Albert's world to vivid life. Victoria and Albert follows this extraordinary relationship between two very different people—she impulsive, emotional, capricious; he cautious, self-controlled, and logical—whose devotion to each other was unparalleled in royal history. Taking fans deeper into the world of Victoria than ever before, Victoria and Albert: A Royal Love Affair is the ultimate gift for devotees of the show.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[A] delectable double bio . . . Talk about Victoria’s secret. . . . A fascinating portrait of a genuine love match, but one in which the partners dealt with surprisingly modern issues.” —USA Today It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth century—and one of history’ s most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chronicler Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity, qualities neither had seen much of as children. The love affair that emerges is far more captivating, complex, and relevant than that depicted in any previous account. The epic relationship began poorly. The cousins first met as teenagers for a few brief, awkward, chaperoned weeks in 1836. At seventeen, charming rather than beautiful, Victoria already “showed signs of wanting her own way.” Albert, the boy who had been groomed for her since birth, was chubby, self-absorbed, and showed no interest in girls, let alone this princess. So when they met again in 1839 as queen and presumed prince-consort-to-be, neither had particularly high hopes. But the queen was delighted to discover a grown man, refined, accomplished, and whiskered. “Albert is beautiful!” Victoria wrote, and she proposed just three days later. As Gill reveals, Victoria and Albert entered their marriage longing for intimate companionship, yet each was determined to be the ruler. This dynamic would continue through the years—each spouse, headstrong and impassioned, eager to lead the marriage on his or her own terms. For two decades, Victoria and Albert engaged in a very public contest for dominance. Against all odds, the marriage succeeded, but it was always a work in progress. And in the end, it was Albert’s early death that set the Queen free to create the myth of her marriage as a peaceful idyll and her husband as Galahad, pure and perfect. As Gill shows, the marriage of Victoria and Albert was great not because it was perfect but because it was passionate and complicated. Wonderfully nuanced, surprising, often acerbic—and informed by revealing excerpts from the pair’s journals and letters—We Two is a revolutionary portrait of a queen and her prince, a fascinating modern perspective on a couple who have become a legend. BONUS: This edition contains a reader's guide.

"The life of Queen Victoria and the passionate love she shared with the German Prince Albert."--Jacket.

In this companion biography to the acclaimed Victoria, A. N. Wilson offers a deeply textured and ambitious portrait of Prince Albert, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the royal consort’s birth. For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But while Victoria is seen as the embodiment of her time, its values, and its paradoxes, it was Prince Albert, A. N. Wilson expertly argues, who was at the vanguard of Victorian Britain’s transformation as a vibrant and extraordinary center of political, technological, scientific, and intellectual advancement. Far more than just the product of his age, Albert was one of its influencers and architects. A composer, engineer, soldier, politician, linguist, and bibliophile, Prince Albert, more than any other royal, was truly a “genius.” It is impossible to understand nineteenth century England without knowing the story of this gifted visionary leader, Wilson contends. Albert lived only forty-two years. Yet in that time, he fathered the royal dynasties of Germany, Russia, Spain, and Bulgaria. Through Victoria, Albert and her German advisers pioneered the idea of the modern constitutional monarchy. In this sweeping biography, Wilson demonstrates that there was hardly any aspect of British national life which Albert did not touch. When he was made Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in his late twenties, it was considered as purely an honorific role. But within months, Albert proposed an extensive reorganization of university life in Britain that would eventually be adopted, making it possible to study science, languages, and modern history at British universities—a revolution in education that has changed the world. Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.

An insight into the private life of this royal couple, as reflected in the family home they created together.

The Victorian era is unquestionably one of the high points in the history of British art--and the culture of that period was defined, as much as anything, by the artistic tastes of Queen Victoria and her beloved Prince Albert. From Victoria's accession in 1837 to Albert's death in 1861, Buckingham Palace was known as "the headquarters of taste," and in a time when royal patronage was still essential to a successful artistic career, the pair enthusiastically collected paintings, sculpture, jewelry, and furniture from a wide range of British and European artists. Victoria & Albert presents the highlights of that extensive collection through more than four hundred beautifully produced full-color illustrations. In addition to the many artworks, both familiar and little-known, that Victoria and Albert collected, the book also features the monarchs' own creations, from paintings, drawings, and etchings to the loving souvenir albums they assembled to record their travels and commemorate the major events of their lives. Opening a window onto the lives of two people as passionate about art as they were about each other, Victoria & Albert will be a comprehensive resource for scholars of British art and the royal family.

A joint biography of Britain's most remarkable and influential royal couple. >