Becoming Queen

Readable...the story about Princess Charlotte is actually more engaging than that of Victoria, whom the author never really seems to get inside of. Maybe he really wanted to write about Charlotte? ( )

Where I got the book: purchased online. Amazon? I've had it for a while.

This is, in a sense, a two-part book, and the blurb is pretty deceptive. Fortunately I do not remove stars for publisher shenanigans. From the blurb you'd think this book is all about Queen Victoria whereas in fact 100+ of the 346 pages of text are devoted to her far less well-known cousin Charlotte, daughter of George IV (better known as the Prince Regent) and, during her short lifetime, heir-presumptive to the British throne. If she had lived to become Queen, Victoria would probably be a minor footnote in history and we could be talking about the Charlottian age (OK, probably some variation on Carolingian). Charlotte and Leopold instead of Victoria and Albert; I would like to spend some time developing that idea. (Leopold, interestingly enough, eventually became the first King of the Belgians.)

I'm not complaining about the time spent learning about Charlotte, because this lively soap-opera of a dual biography is exactly what I needed to understand a vital point in British history; the transition between the reign of the Hanoverians with their (not all at once--well, not always all at once) dull, incompetent, vice-ridden, hard-drinking, insane, eccentric, greedy and peculiar German princes and the new age of propriety and pantaloons we call the Victorian era. I had always thought of Victoria as the last of the Hanoverians but in fact she was never a Hanoverian ruler; under Salic Law a female could not inherit the Hanoverian title so it passed to Victoria's uncle the Duke of Cumberland. Even that's not as simple as it sounds, but that's another story... Suffice it to say that if Victoria had died before she ensured the succession so very effectively (nine children), the British and German succession would have got all mixed up again so thanks for all the childbearing, Ma'am. And George V got rid of all the British monarchy's German titles during World War I and renamed his family Windsor...

But I digress. The point is that the period between George III and Victoria wasn't an easy one for Britons longing for dynastic stability and Kate Williams has rightly fastened on it as a wonderful story, especially as two of the main players were young girls with parental issues. Charlotte's parents hated each other and the closer she got to the throne, the more they began to battle to get control of her. Victoria lost her father at an early age and fought throughout her teenage years to get out from under her power-hungry mother and her "special advisor" (ahem.)

The result is a fantastic soap-opera that would stand up to the Tudors any day and Kate Williams does a wonderful job with it, keeping the threads of the story in front of the reader so that I never lost track. She also covers the courtship and very early years of Victoria and Albert, which is a great story in itself. My appetite is whetted for much, much more about this period in British history, which also covers the century when Britain went from being a mostly rural, slightly backward (culturally speaking) society to the industrial and cultural superpower it was by the dawn of WWI. Suggestions for further reading are very welcome. ( )

Anyone interested in royal biography and in 19th century English history will enjoy this very well-researched account of the death of Princess Charlotte, the scramble by George IV's brothers to produce a legitimate child, and the life of Victoria till 1842. Inter alia, the account of the horrendous medical attention to Charlotte will horrify a reader. This book is excellently and felicitously written. ( )

A dual biography of Princess Charlotte, daughter of George IV, and Queen Victoria. Princess Charlotte was in direct line for the throne until her death at the age of 21 in childbirth. Her death was one of the contributing factors leading to Victoria's birth and her eventual ascension to the throne.

I picked up this biography after watching The Young Victoria last weekend, which piqued my curiousity about a British monarch I knew relatively little about. This book, while intriguing, was not as illuminating as I had hoped. The first half of the book focuses on Charlotte, and considering the book as a whole, it seems that Williams was far more interested in her first subject as opposed to her second. While her discussion of Victoria's life is sufficient, I felt that it provided me with little extra information from what I had already gleaned from the film. She also doesn't not go into as much detail on Victoria's life following her marriage to Prince Albert, and glosses over most of the Queen's life following the birth of her second child.

Williams does an excellent job of providing a strong context for the lives of both Charlotte and Victoria, exploring the various political machinations that surrounded them and the social upheaval related to enclosure and industrialization that was occurring at that time. However, her book suffers for having two subjects and Victoria, considering her tremendously long reign, gets shorted out of space due to the extended consideration given to Charlotte. Also, for some individuals the lack of footnotes may be off-putting although references for all quotations are listed in the endnotes and there is a decent bibliography provided.

Overall, a decent exploration of the circumstances contributing to and surrounding Victoria's rise to the throne but not a highly definitive biography of Britain's longest reigning monarch. ( )

a book every reader of regancy romances should read

wlhen Victoria and Albert, he was a prig, were married he tryed to insist that only girls whose mothers were of good charactor should be bridesmaids, there weren't enough girls sho qualified. ( )