Victoria Revealed:Kensington Palace

As part of the £12m revamp of Kensington Palace recently unveiled, a new permanent exhibition explores the life and reign of one of the palace’s most famous residents, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, Queen Victoria. There are four new visitor routes inside the palace. Victoria Revealed is one. Showing more than 300 items, it tells the story of Victoria as princess, queen, wife, mother and widow. By and large, it does so in her own words, quoting from her diaries — an assiduous diary writer, she began a journal aged 12 — her letters to Prince Albert, to ministers and so on. In the room where Victoria is thought to have been born, we see childhood clothes, dolls and toys, among them her black silk baby shoes, a toy carriage, and a collection of dolls modelled on court ladies and stage idols. Victoria is mostly remembered as a matronly figure, in mourning for much of her reign. But the first dress she wore as a monarch and her ivory silk wedding dress (on show for the first time in a decade) reveal a diminutive figure with a tiny waistline. The restored Red Saloon displays the plain (originally) black dress with white muslin collar that the 18-year-old Victoria wore when she attended her first official Privy Council meeting on June 20, 1837, the first document she approved as monarch, signed ‘Victoria R’, and a cabinet of her jewellery. A soundscape tells us that Victoria “went through the whole ceremony . . . with perfect calmness . . . and graceful modesty.” Paintings include the ‘secret’ portrait Victoria had made for her beloved Albert as a birthday present: German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s (1845) portrayal shows an alluring young woman, bare shouldered and hair down. In a later Winterhalter portrait (1856) she wears a bright red dress and magnificent brooch in which is set the 1,000-year-old Koh-i-noor diamond. Wearing red was unusual for Victoria, for she favoured black even before Prince Albert’s death in 1861.