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Happy Birthday, Queen Victoria!
May. 24th, 2012 07:51 pmSo today, Queen Victoria is a ripe old (yes, very old and no doubt very ripe too!) 193. We celebrated "Victoria Day" three days ago; the day is also supposed to be in lieu of celebrating the birthday of the currently reigning monarch, Elizabeth II. But even in the U.K., they don't celebrate her birthday ON her birthday - it actually falls in April, but they don't celebrate till June.
I've always thought it must be nice to be able to have free rein and free reign as to what day you'd like to celebrate your birthday. My birthday falls in the first half of August, when the weather is often nice enough, but people tend to be away on holidays. That made it hard to organize birthday parties when I was a kid but on the plus side, I never had to go to school on my birthday! Some people who have their birthdays on Christmas Day, or just before or just after Christmas, feel somewhat cheated because they don't have a day just for themselves. And of course in some families, more than one member shares a birthday. In my own family, I was born on my father's birthday, while one of my sisters was born on our mother's birthday. My daughter was born on what would have been my grandmother's 91st birthday. Twins and other multiple birthlings are obvious examples of shared family birthdays. Then you get people born on February 29, who only get to celebrate that specific date once every four years.
In honour of Queen Victoria's birthday, I recently re-read a biography of her by Molly Costain Haycraft, which I originally read for school in grade six. It basically emphasized the same period of her life as that covered in the movie Young Victoria, with only one chapter at the end dealing with all the things that happened after Albert died. There were two big differences between the book and the movie, however. First of all, the book was clearly written for children while the movie was directed at a more general audience. Secondly, the book was written about fifty years before the movie was made, and both reflect the sensibilities of their respective times.
The book had quite a lot of descriptive details in it - what type of lessons Victoria was taught by her tutors; extensive descriptions of her wardrobe and meals on various occasions, description of palace architecture and grounds (including a somewhat coy observation that indoor plumbing was an "innovation" in Victoria's day). It made liberal and (one assumes) quite innocent use of the word "gay" in the then-prevailing sense of cheerful or cheery. It also included quite a bit on Victoria's difficult relationship with her mother and the whole situation with suitors and arranged marriages. There was some reference too to what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, including the "problem" of Canada (referring mainly to the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada) and of the Irish (including an observation along the lines that they had always been an excitable people).
I actually found myself remembering parts of the book, though through a rather different set of lenses! Reading books, especially about the past or the future, involves such a complex interaction between the viewpoints of author, reader, characters... and re-reading at different times in your life complicates those complexities still further. Not a new insight, but that's my thought for the day.
I've always thought it must be nice to be able to have free rein and free reign as to what day you'd like to celebrate your birthday. My birthday falls in the first half of August, when the weather is often nice enough, but people tend to be away on holidays. That made it hard to organize birthday parties when I was a kid but on the plus side, I never had to go to school on my birthday! Some people who have their birthdays on Christmas Day, or just before or just after Christmas, feel somewhat cheated because they don't have a day just for themselves. And of course in some families, more than one member shares a birthday. In my own family, I was born on my father's birthday, while one of my sisters was born on our mother's birthday. My daughter was born on what would have been my grandmother's 91st birthday. Twins and other multiple birthlings are obvious examples of shared family birthdays. Then you get people born on February 29, who only get to celebrate that specific date once every four years.
In honour of Queen Victoria's birthday, I recently re-read a biography of her by Molly Costain Haycraft, which I originally read for school in grade six. It basically emphasized the same period of her life as that covered in the movie Young Victoria, with only one chapter at the end dealing with all the things that happened after Albert died. There were two big differences between the book and the movie, however. First of all, the book was clearly written for children while the movie was directed at a more general audience. Secondly, the book was written about fifty years before the movie was made, and both reflect the sensibilities of their respective times.
The book had quite a lot of descriptive details in it - what type of lessons Victoria was taught by her tutors; extensive descriptions of her wardrobe and meals on various occasions, description of palace architecture and grounds (including a somewhat coy observation that indoor plumbing was an "innovation" in Victoria's day). It made liberal and (one assumes) quite innocent use of the word "gay" in the then-prevailing sense of cheerful or cheery. It also included quite a bit on Victoria's difficult relationship with her mother and the whole situation with suitors and arranged marriages. There was some reference too to what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, including the "problem" of Canada (referring mainly to the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada) and of the Irish (including an observation along the lines that they had always been an excitable people).
I actually found myself remembering parts of the book, though through a rather different set of lenses! Reading books, especially about the past or the future, involves such a complex interaction between the viewpoints of author, reader, characters... and re-reading at different times in your life complicates those complexities still further. Not a new insight, but that's my thought for the day.
