image id: ps_prn_cd39_569
William Keenan (b. ca. 1810)
Her Highness the Princess Victoria
Stipple engraving
Philadelphia: E. Littell ..., n.d.
NYPL, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print
Collection
Princess Victoria does not look like the sort of girl who would describe herself
as “VERY VERY VERY VERY HORRIBLY NAUGHTY!!!!!” but she did, in
1832. She had absorbed a stern sense of discipline and asserted her power by
firing her mother’s ambitious advisor, Sir John Conroy, as soon as she
became queen in 1837. During her long reign, monarchical power diminished steadily,
and Victoria took the middle-class virtues that her mother had imparted—conventionality,
truthfulness, the wish to be good—and made them royal as well.
