Queen Victoria: A Personal History was published by HarperCollins in 2000. Hibbert’s subtitle is deliberate: this is not a political history of the Victorian age but a personal biography of the woman who gave it her name. Drawing extensively on Victoria’s own journals (which she kept from the age of thirteen until her death at eighty-one) and on the vast archive of her correspondence, Hibbert constructs a portrait that is simultaneously sympathetic and clear-eyed.
The Victoria who emerges is far more complex than either the stern widow of popular imagination or the romantic young queen of recent film adaptations. She was passionate — her journals about Albert are startlingly physical for the era. She was politically opinionated — her conflicts with Gladstone were driven by genuine ideological disagreement, not mere personal dislike. She was emotionally volatile — her grief after Albert’s death in 1861 was so extreme that it alarmed her ministers and alienated her subjects. And she was honest — her journals record her feelings with a directness that makes most royal autobiography seem scripted by comparison.
Hibbert, who had spent forty years writing about the British monarchy and aristocracy, brings to this late-career biography the accumulated understanding of a lifetime’s research. His Victoria is neither idealized nor debunked but presented with the kind of sympathetic precision that only comes from long acquaintance with the sources.
Collecting Queen Victoria
First edition (HarperCollins, London, 2000): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15