As Queen Victoria, or depictions of her, created a feeling of kinship between her subjects from across the globe, the media image of Victoria also encouraged a close kinship between everyday citizens and their queen. A main reason women’s periodicals were so influential is that they encouraged a bourgeois domestic image of Queen Victoria, “domesticat[ing] the appeal of the monarchy” and “encourag[ing] a personal and familiar relationship between Victoria and her female subjects” (Plunkett 87). Both social and domestic periodicals depicted images of Queen Victoria that showed her as the epitome of the English wife and mother, and the ideals Victoria supposedly enacted “trickle[d] down through the ranks from Queen Victoria herself” to the
ideology of everyday middle-class citizens (Dever 8). “She is placed perilously high in station,” one article, “so that all eyes look at her; and her life is what it ought to be—really exemplary” (“Long”).
Generating both photographic depictions as well as written explanations of maternal expectations, magazines played a prominent role in the establishment of the Victorian
expectations regarding motherhood across different classes. Many middle-class mothers felt a kinship to Victoria and looked up to her as a shining example of motherhood, trying to imitate her maternity in their daily lives. Plunkett suggests that the women’s media market, including not only periodicals, but also books of beauty prior to the mid-1840s, and later ladies’ journals and illustrated newspapers, “encouraged a personal and familiar relationship between Victoria and her female subjects” (87). Readers, thus, felt a connection to their queen that normalized the hope of imitating her in their maternal and domestic lives. In fact, an American writer pointed out, “The life of Queen Victoria as a mother was hardly different from that of any other women, except that the occupations of state forced her to see less of her children than most mothers do. The royal nursery was like that of any other household” (Jeune 623). Thus, even when
Victoria’s shortcomings as a mother were recognized—Jeune points out that Victoria was unable to spend as much time with her children as most mothers—the idea persisted that her maternal example felt relatable to middle-class women because they functioned similarly.
Elizabeth Langland notes Victoria’s domestic performance, especially as it capitalized on middle-class principles. Langland explains, “In her reliance on Albert, in her professed
ineptitude for public rule, Victoria constructed herself through emergent middle-class values; she presented herself through a scrim of domestic virtues emphasizing home, hearth, and heart” (Nobody’s 63). Thus, despite her higher class status, middle-class mothers were compelled to
live up to Victoria’s maternal image because the representations she produced were so clearly in line with middle-class values. The numerous media representations of Queen Victoria and her family felt relatable to middle-class mothers, despite the fact that Victoria actually performed a domestic role for public consumption. She never admitted publicly to facing challenges as a mother. Homans has described Victoria’s monarchy as a “popular spectacle,” illuminating how her life on display worked to establish various domestic ideals and values, many of which are still recognizable as uniquely Victorian (Royal 4). Speaking to the relationship between Victoria’s performance and her mostly middle-class audience, Homans explains, “The association between royal spectacle and middle-class practices and values came to seem the permanent hallmark of the royal family” (Royal 4). Media depictions of Victoria’s domesticity were just the first of many royal values that middle classes would try to emulate through the years.
Homans also notes the connection between Victoria and middle-class mothers, and her understanding of this connection raises the stakes of Victoria’s success in her campaign to relate intimately to the middle class. “Serious-minded middle-class domesticity was becoming the behavioral norm for England,” Homans explains, “and in behaving publicly like members of the middle class, Victoria and Albert helped their nation to become powerful and prosperous by helping it see itself as a middle-class nation” (Royal 5). Thus, the importance of the connection Victoria established with her middle-class citizens was even more elevated, as Victoria’s image as an ideal middle-class mother set the standard for the future prosperity of the nation. We have seen how middle-class mothers were told they bore this same burden, as well.
The problem with Victoria’s ideal maternal image was that her private feelings were much colder toward her children than she demonstrated outwardly. She did not actually live up
to the ideals she imparted to her subjects, and the fact that the queen could not live up to her own standard suggests the difficulty placed on middle-class mothers. “It is now accepted,” Richard Atlick explains, “though scarcely to be thought of in her own lifetime, that Queen Victoria did not like babies; the more that came, the less welcome they seem, in retrospect, to have been” (423). “She was not what the guidebooks said mothers should be,” Natalie McKnight further notes (15). In fact, Victoria describes newborn babies as “froglike,” expressing that “an ugly baby is a very nasty object” (Dearest Child 191).
Victoria admitted privately to her eldest daughter, Vicky, “I hated the thought of having children and have no adoration for very little babies” (Dearest Child 167). When Vicky
announced her first pregnancy to her mother, the queen called it “horrid news” that “upset us dreadfully” (Dearest Child 108.) Of course, Victoria did not harbor only negative sentiments toward her nine children. As Margaret Homans has pointed out, Victoria:
Both publicly impersonated a domestic woman and really was one. She did indeed appear to be an ordinary, happily married woman. She represents palatial Balmoral Castle and Osborne House, the settings for some of her and Albert's most impressive performances of domesticated monarchy, as homes and herself as an ordinary woman who adored her husband and took an uncommon interest in raising her children. (Royal 5)
Thus, Victoria was not necessarily a bad mother, but simply a realistic one who succumbed to shortcomings like any other mother, only she did not show those shortcomings publicly.
The frustration Victoria sometimes felt toward motherhood highlights the imperfections in her largely perfect image, reaffirming that her maternal representation was, to a degree, a performance. Victoria’s realistic experience of motherhood, in which she struggled with various
facets of motherhood while also enjoying many of its moments, are evident in her private letters. She admitted to Vicky, “No one recognizes more than I do, the blessing of having children, but the anxieties and trouble—not to say sorrows—are quite as great as the blessings” (Dearest Mama 304). The sentiment Queen Victoria expressed in this statement is perhaps the closest connection to true middle-class motherhood that she made, but she avoided making these feelings known publicly. She recognized that her maternal image was largely the source of her popularity and that middle-class English mothers aimed to mimic the model she had created. Victoria “perpetuated the gap between the ideal and the real that conduct books for mothers had developed,” McKnight explains, “inspiring and furthering the expectations of mothers
established by guidebooks, periodicals, and novels” (14, 15). This discrepancy between theory and practice, however, created problems for middle-class mothers, who attempted to follow Victoria’s example, not knowing that the ideals to which they were trying to live up were nearly impossible to achieve.
Although motherhood was not a new institution in the mid-nineteenth century, emerging and changing norms regarding Victorian expectations for motherhood were only beginning to take shape. The varying norms regarding middle-class motherhood created a difficult set of expectations that most mothers could not realistically achieve. The heavily nuanced expectations were ever changing and sometimes contradictory. Thus, no specific set of rules can define what was expected from Victorian mothers. Rather, an abundance of rules and ideas constantly made their way into public discourse through various forms of media and through ideal representations of Queen Victoria. These expectations placed immense pressure on mothers, and middle-class mothers struggled to achieve the ideal, a problem regularly depicted in fiction. In the chapters that follow, I examine the nuances of maternal expectations from different angles through
literature of the mid-Victorian period. I highlight different aspects of maternal expectations, discovering how the norms regarding motherhood, and eventually alternative forms of motherhood, changed throughout the nineteenth century.
3 CHAPTER 2