Inside the world of Victoria: feminist queen
A Buckingham Palace exhibition reveals how the female touch was source of beloved royal traditions
‘It is significant that it is a woman who defined our nation’s concept of what sovereign power looks like’
THE sight of the Royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for celebrations is a tradition much loved by the public.
But the curator of a new exhibition at the royal residence says it is also part of a “feminist transformation” of the monarchy driven by Queen Victoria.
The exhibition, which marks 200 years since Queen Victoria’s birth, explores the relationship between Britain’s second-longest reigning monarch and the building that she made her home.
She was the first monarch to live at Buckingham Palace full time, marking a shift towards “female power” centred on the home and the monarch’s relationship with the public rather than military might, according to Dr Amanda Foreman, the co-curator of the exhibition.
The balcony was added at the same time as the palace’s East Wing, commissioned by Queen Victoria to expand its private apartment space.
It was designed to allow the royals to look directly on to the crowds below, and was first used by Victoria to welcome home soldiers who had fought for the Empire in the Crimean War. She was also the first monarch to hold garden parties, beginning a new custom that last year saw more than 30,000 invited to Buckingham Palace.
“What I think you can see here in this exhibition is the structure of the monarchy and the traditions that are beloved, and we have come to expect … began with Victoria,” Dr Foreman said.
“It is significant it is a woman who was responsible for these traditions and defined our nation’s concept of what sovereign power looks like, how it is experienced and expressed.”
Although she said Queen Victoria and her contemporaries would never have used the expression “feminist” to describe themselves, Dr Foreman said the changes to Buckingham Palace and the monarchy itself “were very much a feminist transformation”.
“The key thing is that we tend to diminish the contributions of women, we assign their successes to the men around them,” she said. “We tend to simply forget who was responsible for certain things.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a recreation of Victoria’s ballroom, using Hollywood production techniques to imitate the original decoration.
Although the ballroom was designed to be colourful, a renovation of the palace by King Edward VII in 1907 saw the walls repainted white with gold embellishments. A complex arrangement of projectors allows visitors to experience the original decor for the first time in more than 100 years.
Practical Magic, a production company that worked on the film Dunkirk, have also used a modern version of a Victorian stage trick to project a 3D video of dancers into the room.
Seeing a preview yesterday, the Queen joked she was pleased that she no longer had to dance in the same style.
“Thank God we don’t have to do that any more,” she said.
Dr Foreman, who guided the Queen and the Duke of York around the exhibition, said: “She loved it, she was totally engrossed.”