Queen Victoria: A Personal History By Christopher Hibbert

I got about half way through the book and only scanned the rest of it. That might have more to do with me than with the author.

Basically this is an unusually readable book about a very unlikable woman. The 19th century was a rotten time to be a child. Victoria's childhood was pretty miserable, but her children's childhood was probably equally miserable.

I found myself cheering for her when she stood up to her mother on the day she became Queen, but it was also obvious from the book that she had been working on that and thinking about it for months, and possibly years, before it happened.

But as she got older, especially during the years of her widowhood, she became more and more abusive to her children and to the women who served her. Basically she was a bully who was certain that the world ought to revolve around just one person - herself.

I don't know how the author felt about Queen Victoria, but I didn't want to spend any more time in her presence so the book is getting returned to the library. 9780006388432 this is not a bad book but it could have used someone that made the facts and historical events more fun to read about since reading this book a lot like a history school book: as many facts, information and actual quotes crammed into the pages as possible without ever pausing to stop and make it actually readable or enjoyable to learn it all.

don’t get me wrong, the author clearly did his work!
this book is full of interesting facts and a lot of direct quotes taken from letters or other writings either from the queen or people in direct contact with her.

so it really gives a view how her life was like.

but the entire book fells like dried up ashes!

there is no live it it at all.

and while i don’t mind just getting facts and informations about history or people that lived it... it’s always nice to actually have an author that manages to make the past feel as if it’s actually something that was alive and happening instead if just droning on and on.

if you love the victorian area and need to read everything about it and/or want to learn basically all the information about queen victoria: this is the book for you!

if you need a bit more, not just a book that feels and more or less reads like a bulletpoint facts of everything that happens in queen victorias life: might want to skip this one or just skim this book and try something else.

i would have loved to get a bit more of what kind of behavior this clearly disturbed queen showcased outside the official moments. maybe speculate a little bit based on facts? not to make it fiction but just taking a bit of an opinion on what kind of person this queen was.
i would have loved to see that, but i didn’t get it. which is fine but also didn’t make it overly enjoyable to read this book, for me personally!

as already said it’s not a bad book, it’s just not one of those historical nonfiction books that takes you into the history and makes the people it talks about seem alive! 9780006388432 I have read many books written on Victoria, and I took many courses on her and her reign throughout my university years, so I am always a bit picky when it comes to biography.

I was recommended this one by some friends, and it is definitely one of the best I have read so far.

Christopher Hibbert knows what he talks about, it is researched and he relies on various sources. It is also very entertaining to read - if you fear boring biographies, this one is definitely far from annoying! 9780006388432 I learned a lot and thought Hibbert's account was well-researched and, unlike many scholarly biographies, not dull or too footnote-laden. 9780006388432 Queen Victoria was, as A.N. Wilson described her, a 'loveable monster', wilful, stubborn, capricious, demanding, but also capable of great charm and insight, compassionate, utterly without prejudice as to class, caste, race or religion but insistent to the nth degree on the minutiae of court protocol and precedent. She was a tremendously contradictory figure, and yet even today her influence lingers on. Modern Britain is still very much Victoria's Britain.

In this engaging biography, Hibbert really manages to capture her personality so that she becomes more than just the symbol of an Empire and an age, but a real vital and vivid individual. This is not a history of Victoria's time or reign; as the title states it is very much a personal history of Victoria herself. Few of the great events of the age are dealt with in any in-depth fashion, and monumental personalities such as Wellington, Gladstone and Disraeli appear solely in relation to their dealings and relationship with the Queen. Light as it may be, it is nonetheless an enjoyable and undemanding read. 9780006388432

Christopher Hibbert’s acclaimed biography of Queen Victoria is as impressive and authoritative as the great woman herself.


In 1837 an eighteen-year-old girl, raised by a German mother, inherited the throne of the United Kingdom. She was to reign as queen – and later Empress of India – for almost sixty-four years, presiding over twenty prime ministers and a period of unprecedented social and political change. Her era became synonymous with moral rigidity and colonial expansion, and this absorbing biography of Queen Victoria, the unlikely figurehead of a vast and powerful empire, explores how the young monarch transformed herself into a formidable matriarch and the epitome of an age.


Embracing her life and family, her politics and personality, her love for Prince Albert and her relationship with John Brown, Hibbert’s touching biography is a persuasive portrait of a remarkable woman. Queen Victoria: A Personal History

Christopher Hibbert ô 2 Characters

This is a long book about a long life lived under intense scrutiny, even when she withdrew from public view. I especially appreciated the insights into the contradictions of her attitudes, such as being against women's suffrage while being, herself, one of the most powerful women on earth. The inclusion of so many of her own words made her seem accessible as an actual person rather than an historical personage.

I've been fascinated with the Industrial Revolution for a very long time, ever since I realized it wasn't the boring classroom topic with all the human drama squeezed out of it. I've been interested in these years of the high watermark of the British Empire and how the English could be so carefully polite at home but wreak terror on the people of other nations. The years of approximately 1830-1930 hold the most interest for me historically. HM Queen Victoria lived during most of this time and left her stamp on everything. Everything.

Hibbert's book is very readable and deeply researched. I didn't read anything in it that made me think, Now, I don't think that's accurate. So, as far as my amateur status can state with confidence, I think it's marvelous. 9780006388432 Fascinating and very enjoyable biography of Queen Victoria. 9780006388432 I stopped at chapter 27. In the beginning it was interesting and I understood what was going on but after awhile it just droned on and on and on and I got really bored of it. It is an interesting book but you really have to be committed to finish reading it. I think if there were a few less adjectives and maybe not so many really long and detailed footnotes, it might be a bit shorter. 9780006388432 A deligthfully written and constructed, lengthy biography of Victoria.

Christopher Hibbert has that knack fo drawing the reader in at a very early stage (page one!) and keeping the attention with some stylish, informative writing.

This biography is a standard format, ie from cradle to grave, but is formatted with chapters on different aspects of Victoria's life, not neccesarily directly chronologically. But it loses nothing for this because each chapter is so carefully blended with the next that nothing strikes the reader as being out of place.

There are fascinating facts on Victoria's relationship with John Brown and also on her fascination for her Indian Munchie. Obviously her love for Albert shines through and her relationship with her children and grandchildren is fully explored.

There is not a moment when the interest flags and it is something of a disappointment when Victoria dies and the book ends. 9780006388432 Christopher Hibbert has definite opinions about Queen Victoria's behavior. He also has meticulous documentation to back up those opinions. There's none of those She must have thought...(or felt or been) dreary sentences presuming on a mental connection he didn't have to his subject. He presents this woman who, with her husband Prince Albert, put her moral and middle-class stamp on an age, as a very complex and flawed human being. Smothered, isolated and verbally abused as a child, Victoria grew into a woman who guarded her prerogatives fiercely. Mr Hibbert displays her against the background of her times, letting us see for ourselves her prejudices, regality, self absorption, humor, mad love for her spouse and yet her mistreatment of him, her coldness to many of her children and yet the heat of her passions for England and justice.
This was, despite its size, an easy read because of Mr Hibbert's clear, plain writing. And also because, while often a boring host at dinner, Victoria's behavior was neither common nor dull.

I plan on reading more of Christopher Hibbert's work. 9780006388432