Queen Victoria The World's Most Photographed

On 17th January 1852,

a mother and five of her children gathered

together to have their photograph taken.

Trying to keep perfectly still, they stared into the lens of one of the first cameras ever to be invented.

Little by little, their image began to appear, like magic, on a small metal plate inside.

But the sitting didn't go well.

The mother had moved at just the wrong moment, and the photographer had captured her with her eyes shut.

As soon as she saw the picture, she defaced it

using her thumb to scratch away her image from the metal.

Over the next 50 years, photography would transform the face behind the

scratches into the defining symbol of British Imperial power.

The woman in the photograph was Queen Victoria.

The invention of photography coincided almost exactly

with Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837.

At the time, Victoria was an 18-year-old, inexperienced in politics and the pursuit of power.

And photography was little more than a novel curiosity in its infancy.

During the course of her 64-year reign, the Queen would become the world's most powerful head of state,

ruling an Empire covering a quarter of the globe.

She would also become the first woman in the world to live both her

public and private lives in front of the camera.

And the first monarch to use photography to win the support of her people.

# Sweet, sweet, memories you gave to me... #

The earliest royal photographs were not, in fact, of Queen Victoria,

but of her husband, Prince Albert.

While on a trip to Brighton in March 1842, he visited a photographer

called William Constable, and had two portraits taken.

Known as daguerreotypes,

the pictures were printed on metal plates treated with chemicals.

In one, he looks quite handsome, in the other he looks

perhaps not quite so handsome. They're fascinating -

they're so early and he's young.

You see why Victoria was so keen on him.

Two years later, Queen Victoria herself was photographed for the first time.

Posing with her daughter Princess Vicky, the 25-year-old

queen looks like an ordinary mother

with nothing more on her mind than the welfare of her family.

But she was soon to face the first political crisis of her reign.

And another photographer would be on hand to record it.

On 10th April 1848, William Kilburn set up his camera

on Kennington Common in South London to photograph a political protest rally organised by a group called

the Chartists who were campaigning for electoral reform.

This is where the curtain goes up on recording history as it happened.

Suddenly you're seeing something which is a dramatic

moment politically in the history of this country actually recorded.

That is exactly what it was like on 10th April 1848,

and for those who saw it, it must have been electrifying.

This wasn't a republican movement, they still believed, the vast majority of them, in the monarchy,

but it was a radical movement, it was a working class protest movement and

as such was rather fearful for the political and royal establishment.

1848 was the year of revolutions in Europe, crowns were toppling all over the place.

So obviously with the threat of 200,000 people descending on London, everybody got the wind up.

In the days before the rally, the British Establishment was in a state of panic.

Terrified, the royal family fled to the safety of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight,

where Victoria wrote in her diary, "I tremble at the thought of what may possibly await us here".

But Victoria's fears turned out to be unfounded.

The protest was contained and the crisis passed.

Later that year, Prince Albert acquired two new photographs for

the royal collection - Kilburn's daguerreotypes of the Chartist rally.

The pictures would always be there to remind Victoria that her people had the power to turn against her.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the perfect opportunity to boost

the nation's morale and raise the royal profile.

Organised by Prince Albert, it was staged in the specially-constructed

Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.

The Great Exhibition was an enormous success.

We don't have a revolution in 1848.

Instead, in 1851, we have this celebration of our peace and our prosperity and our productivity.

At the exhibition, all the latest technical innovations were on display

including Victoria and Albert's favourite new gadget, the camera.

Six million visitors were treated to demonstrations of brand new photographic techniques.

Negatives had just been invented, so photographs could now be printed

on paper, and produced in multiple copies.

Excited by the new techniques and eager to make a record of their own private happiness, Victoria

and Albert started to commission photographs for their family albums.

In 1854, they invited the photographer,

Roger Fenton, to take pictures of them recreating their wedding day,

14 years after they were married.

In the same year, Fenton also captured

the children's tableaux vivants,

created to amuse their parents on their wedding anniversary.

He was a great photographer, Fenton,

just absolutely marvellous, because we have those incredible photographs,

informal ones of the Royal Family which he

took, one thinks particularly of the ones of the children.

They absolutely evoke the 1850s in a way which transports you, really.

They have a kind of truth that utterly haunts one.

In a way, he waves a wand over them, doesn't he?

And why not?

Victoria writes in her journals how they would sit by the fire

on Sunday evening and go through

these albums page by page and it's very touching, but they were

very private and intimate things to them, and they were not, absolutely not, for public consumption.

But royal photography would not stay private and innocent for long.

The camera was about to propel Queen Victoria into a new media age that would transform the monarchy.

In 1854 in France, a man named Andre Disderi

had discovered a way to mass-produce small portrait photographs.

Known as cartes de visites, they arrived in Britain in 1859,

and within three years between three and four million photographs of Queen Victoria had been sold.

# The more I see you The more I want you... #

These little cards would revolutionise the relationship between the Queen and her people.

Members of the public could own for the first time a portrait of their Queen actually taken from life.

Before that, they could only judge what she was like by looking at paintings or engravings or

stamps or coins, but of course when photography came in it was wonderful, there was the Queen!

A little picture of her, you could have her in your own home.

In a way I suppose, the equivalent is Hello! magazine and celeb culture today.

That's exactly what it was like, everybody collected these things.

Victoria and Albert were quick to exploit the potential power of cartes de visites.

In August 1860, they commissioned a series of

portraits for an album that would be made available to the public.

Despite the substantial price - £4 and four shillings -

the album sold 60,000 copies within a week of its release.

The monarchy had to be seen to be more accessible, more open.

It was a changing society with an ever expanding middle class and therefore it was

extremely clever of the Royal family to take up a curtain on themselves.

The Queen's popularity was reaching levels that had been impossible to imagine just 10 years before.

She had used photography to regain the support of her people.

Now she would use it to consolidate her power and establish a more imposing regal image.

The first state portrait of Queen Victoria was taken by a photographer

called Charles Clifford on 14th November 1861.

Wearing formal dress, a ceremonial sash and crown,

Victoria was portraying herself as Queen for the first time.

She appeared to be unassailable.

But Victoria's life was about to fall apart.

On 14th December 1861, one month to the day after the Clifford portrait

was taken, her adored husband Albert died of typhoid at the age of 42.

Victoria went into deep mourning.

Almost mad with grief, she gave instructions to

Albert's servants to continue their daily routines as normal.

The water was put out for him to wash, the clothes were still laid out.

It was a kind of surreal atmosphere.

Victoria even asked a photographer to take a picture

of the bed in which Albert had died.

The rooms were photographed, photographed as record because she

wanted them kept exactly as they always were.

Photography was used to extend grief.

For most of the next 10 years, Victoria would disappear from public view.

She divided her time between her most remote private residences -

Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and her Highland retreat, Balmoral.

But even when she was too distraught to go out in public, the Queen still managed to pose for photographs.

# I love you so much

# It hurts me

# Darlin', that's why

# I'm so blue... #

It seems sort of strange to me that although she didn't appear in

public, she could put up with being photographed.

It seems to me that if I was so grief-stricken I couldn't even think

about sitting for a photograph,

but the way she thought of it is that it was a memorial to Albert.

The photographs from the, let's say the first three years after his death, really are devastating.

You do feel that she is absolutely grief-stricken.

The first photograph of Victoria as widow

was taken by her son, Prince Alfred, in 1862.

Like many of the mourning photographs,

the picture shows Victoria gazing with devotion at a bust of Albert.

# I love you so much

# It hurts me so... #

One year later, Victoria was still deep in mourning.

Even on the wedding day of her son to Princess Alexandra,

she insisted on being photographed staring at the same bust.

What kind of wedding day did Princess Alexandra of Denmark have?

There she is looking absolutely wonderful standing to one side,

there's the future Edward VII behind, but what's her mother-in-law?

This sort of black heap looking adoringly up at the bust of Albert!

Most extraordinary sort of image.

Not joyous at all.

Through the 1860s,

Victoria took more and more control over the way she was photographed.

In 1869, The British Journal Of Photography described the Queen's conduct at royal photo sessions:

"The Queen merely takes her seat, and intimates through her secretary

"that she wishes to be taken in a certain attitude.

"The photographer has nothing to do but comply with the order".

If you start looking through those photographs of her during that

period, you begin to think she's really quite a bit naughty.

Because to begin with she is grief-stricken, and then suddenly you get these pictures of her

really arranging herself, really using photography to tell her people, "I'm not fit to come out, I'm sort of

"bowed with grief, spinning away", or, "I'm holding this little dog as a substitute for Albert".

And you feel a very carefully composed image is being projected.

Queen Victoria was trying to use photography as compensation

for her absence from public life.

But the strategy wasn't working.

Within a couple of years of Albert's death, the public were starting to grumble about their invisible Queen.

The monarchy cost of lot of money to keep going, and where was she?

Sort of walled away in Balmoral or Osborne,

never even came to Buckingham Palace, never came to London.

Never held a court, never did anything, never did the things she should do.

# What good is a gal with a million?

# What good if the world calls you queen?

# If you don't have a man to love you

# Then you don't have a doggone thing... #

In 1863, a new figure began to appear in photographs with Queen Victoria.

His name was John Brown,

a ruggedly handsome Scotsman whose job was to take her riding.

The Queen and her servant had become close friends.

The photographs are fascinating.

There she is coming to life again, in a way,

a lady going out riding with him leading her.

In John Brown, this romantic child of the Highlands, with his surly

ways, with his sort of backwardness,

with his innate difficultness, which was frequently the result of drink,

Victoria seemed to find another Albert.

The popular press soon began to speculate wildly about their relationship.

They even invented a new name for the Queen - Mrs Brown.

We don't know the degree of the relationship, whether there was a sexual relationship, or even,

some suggest, whether they even got married in some sort of weird secret ceremony.

But what we do know is that Victoria fell for Brown.

Victoria would always refuse to give up John Brown.

They remained close until his death in 1883.

But the Queen's continued absence from public life and her ambiguous

friendship with Brown, were fuelling anti-monarchist feeling in the country.

In November 1871, a republican on the Government benches

made a speech attacking the absent Queen's expenditure.

The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, refused to rise to her defence.

Victoria's authority had never been more precarious.

And then suddenly Bertie falls ill.

And this is the best thing that could happen for the monarchy.

Bertie was Queen Victoria's eldest son, the Prince of Wales.

He'd caught typhoid fever, the same illness that had

killed his father, Prince Albert, almost exactly 10 years before.

The terrible anniversary approached.

The 14th December was looming, but on that very day the Prince took a turn for the better and started

to recover, to the great relief of everybody including of course his mother and all his relatives.

He recovers, what do they do?

An absolutely mammoth thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral.

And lo and behold, the Queen actually appears. What is more,

not entirely in black,

but covered in ermine!

The thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral provided Queen Victoria with

the perfect opportunity to stop republicanism in its tracks.

In just one day of pomp and ceremony,

she was able to demonstrate her commitment to the nation.

To reinforce her message,

Queen Victoria was photographed in her ermine-trimmed robes.

For the first time in 10 years,

she was re-establishing her image as Queen.

Queen Victoria was now sovereign of the most powerful nation on earth.

The British Empire was expanding rapidly

bringing ever more subjects under her rule.

In 1876, she took on a new title - Empress of India.

To mark the occasion, she commissioned the photographer,

William Downey, to create a suitably imperial portrait.

Here we see the whole transmutation of the image of the monarchy.

We see her seated for the first time on a throne, albeit an Oriental one.

She's bathed in almost a kind of aura of golden light, she's become

a kind of world empress, grandmother of Europe, all wrapped into one.

This is her as Queen. Old lady yes, but serene.

There's a grandeur about the woman.

Millions of people across the Empire

only had access to their monarch through photographs.

So it was increasingly important

to present a convincingly majestic image.

# I'm sittin' on top

# Of the world

# Just rolling along Just rolling along... #

During the 1880s, one of London's most popular society photographers,

Alexander Bassano, was frequently commissioned to ensure

that the Queen looked her best.

Queen Victoria was fat. As far as I can remember she had a 48 inch waist and she was only 50 inches high.

Bassano was master of a new technique which enabled

dramatic re-touching on the negative to improve the subject's appearance.

It's the beginning of...

well, you may not be beautiful when you enter the studio

but the print at the other end, boy, you're ethereal and glamorous.

Bassano's retouched portraits gave Victoria a trimmer waist,

smoother skin, fewer chins and darker hair.

He soon became the Queen's new favourite, and she commissioned him

to take the official portraits for her Golden Jubilee in 1887.

The pictures show her looking imperious, stern,

and distinctly unamused.

When you're smiling

This was the image that would define Victoria for posterity.

But according to her grand-daughter Princess Alice, who was photographed

aged four with Queen Victoria in the same year,

this wasn't what she was really like at all.

People have got a sort of grim idea of her -

we are not amused.

You know, I was so disappointed, I asked her and she never said it!

Because she was amused, you see, she laughed terrifically, showed all her

gums, opened her mouth wide and screamed with laughter.

She was a very cheerful person.

Nobody knows really why Queen Victoria so rarely smiled

in photographs, but I think there were several reasons.

One was that photography in those days took longer than it does now

and you would have to hold your pose for several seconds.

But the other thing was that as Queen, she probably

felt she should look dignified, and she did her best to do this,

this is why she looks serious.

But she could smile, and did!

A family photograph from 1886, showing four generations of female

royalty, bears witness to the other side of the Queen's personality.

The Queen is laughing, she's smiling very broadly,

completely relaxed which is lovely for us to see

when we've seen so many very severe pictures of her.

One year later, and for the first time in 50 years, the public

were given a glimpse of this smile.

This shot of Victoria, taken on the day of her Golden Jubilee,

was released as a carte de visite.

# Cos when you're smiling... #

Photography was still helping Victoria to persuade

her people to like her,

and maybe even to love her.

In 1896, the first moving film footage of the Queen

was shot at Balmoral.

This was the beginning of another revolution in the relationship

between the monarchy and the people.

The inexperienced 18-year-old who had come to the throne 60 years

earlier now had a sophisticated awareness of the importance of image

in the new media age.

When her Diamond Jubilee came around in 1897,

Victoria requested the removal of all copyright restrictions

on the official photograph that was released to mark the occasion.

This guaranteed that it would be mass-produced on royal souvenirs

that would be distributed to every corner of the British Empire.

Her 500 million subjects would now know the face

of the most powerful woman in the world -

Victoria, Queen, Empress and Defender of the Faith.

Queen Victoria died on 22nd January 1901.

The final photograph shows her in her coffin, surrounded, as ever,

by pictures of her beloved Albert.

Photography had helped transform

a young princess into a formidable symbol of imperial power.

Her private life had also been drawn into the public domain by the camera.

But Victoria still managed to take one secret to the grave.

She left her servants a detailed list of the objects

she was to be buried with.

And she made it clear that she didn't want her family

to know what these were.

Perhaps this is because, tucked into her left hand, hidden under flowers

and sheets, was something she didn't want her children to see -

a photograph of her favourite servant

and friend, John Brown.

Subtitles by Emma Biggins BBC Broadcast 2005

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