This year, the centenary year of Queen Victoria's death, has seen a predictable flurry of activity to commemorate Britain's longest serving monarch. Some of that activity, regrettably, reflects our contemporary mores, including a BBC docusoap focussing on Victoria's sexuality, and several works pruriently examining her relationship with John Brown, the Queen's Highlander, and with her Indian Munshi. Christopher Hibbert's biography, on the other hand, eschews sensationalism whilst showing that her era was quite as familiar as are we with royal scandal, republicanism and healthy debate on the constiutional limits of monarchy.

This is a pre-eminently readable biography. To a generation trying to locate itself in a post-Imperial, post-industrial epoch, there is a nostalgic appeal in the story of Victoria's eponymous age when Britain's manufacturing led the world, her ministers regularly extended the bounds of her Imperial sway, her royal family colonised all Europe's ruling houses, and her democratic institutions were the envy of the world. The colour and ceremonial of Victoria's reign is splendidly evoked and there are shades of Jan Morris in the loving and selective detail with which Hibbert describes the scale and ingenuity of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Golden and Diamond Jubilees and the dark solemnity of those inevitable funerals.

Christopher Hibbert is the master of the telling phrase, and of the use of contemporary observation to illuminate his subject. He has drawn heavily on diaries and letters, with all their immediacy, especially those of Victoria herself, though this biography is no mere réchauffé of his 1984 edition of 'Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals'. He is clearly indebted to Greville for his insights into the early years of her reign, and to Ponsonby and Lady Augusta Stanley for the later period. The result is that he generates a sense of intimacy - very much the Personal History of his title. And from the pages emerges a picture of an intelligent, passionate, emotional, self-centred, intemperate, capricious yet generous and humorous woman, capable of swings from deepest depression to helpless giggling. Her love for Albert, her excessive grief on his early death, her frequent distaste for her occasionally libidinous heir, the dubious constitutionality of her fierce loyalty to ministers she trusted, her iron will in submitting her courtiers latterly to a regime of mind-numbing tedium - all have been recorded elsewhere but are well described here.

What sets Hibbert's account apart is that he illuminates new facets of the 'ruby mounted in jet', in Oscar Wilde's telling word portrait of the ageing widow of Windsor. He is excellent on her relationship with her mother and with Conroy, her mother's self-serving advisor; on the contemporary tittle-tattle, not a jot different from that promoted by our own media parasites on the Royal family, which questioned relationships between the Queen and Prince of Wales, and that between the Queen and John Brown, as well as the financial mismanagement and over-weening self-importance of her beloved Munshi. The passages on Albert's fatalism, his final hours, the mausoleum in Windsor she created in his bedroom, and Victoria's subsequent recourse to the occult, to seances, and her dalliance with psychic phenomena - all are intensely readable. Hibbert shows that Victoria had a real sharpness of wit and observation: of Lord John Russell she said that "he would be better company if he had a third subject, for he was interested in nothing except the constitution of 1688 and himself"; and to Gladstone, who rather preciously felt it his duty as a published defender of the Established Church to resign his Cabinet post over government policy to help an Irish Catholic seminary, she said "no one reads your book, and those who do don't understand it". In each case she understood their conceit.

It is in those passages which consider Victoria as a constitutional monarch, a political figure, that Hibbert is at his most revisionist. The popular view of the role of the monarchy sees a vertiginous decline in influence in the last years of the 18th century, and sees William IV's sacking of Melbourne in November 1834 as the last example of a King making real the convention that a Prime Minister was the King's First Minister. Thereafter, the monarch is seen as a dignified and impotent symbol of authority in a parliamentary constitution. But Hibbert's Victoria is a major political figure. She subscribed, only half jokingly, to Baron Stockmar's aphorism that 'the Prime Minister was merely the temporary head of the Cabinet, while the monarch was the permanent premier'. Her involvement in matters of state varied, it is true to say, across her long reign; in the novelty, passion and domesticity of the early days of her marriage she told Peel that 'when one is so happy, blessed in one's home life, as I am, politics (provided my country is safe) must take only second place'. In the aftermath to Albert's death she retreated into a long, black purdah and foreswore public engagements. During this period she worried that she was losing her reason. But for most of her 64 years on the throne she was actively involved and consulted, and our school textbooks, which focus on Prime Ministers exclusively, do Victoria a disservice.

Her views on her ministers were coloured by the manner in which she was brought into the political process. Gladstone,'that half-mad firebrand', who addressed her as if she were a 'public meeting', and who made it clear that he did not consider her views worthy of consideration, she thought a humbug. Tutored by Albert who clearly approved of his almost Germanic efficiency and logic, she came to like Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli, who sent her copious papers, elicited her views, made her feel important, laid his flattery on with a trowel, and so encouraged her to think the monarch to be far more important than her contemporaries believed, she simply adored.

In fact, her importance is unsurprising. She accumulated an unparalleled knowledge on international affairs through her assiduous study of papers and dispatches across two thirds of the 19th century. Moreover, her personal diplomatic network was unrivalled, encompassing the royal houses of Germany, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Greece and Spain. Not all of these relationships were easy and her daughter Vicky's progeny, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, was chippy, boorish, unstable and resentful, especially about all things English, which explains a good deal about the deterioration of Anglo-German relations in the years before 1914. But such family ties unquestionably coloured her views on international affairs, as for instance in her unfashionable sympathy with Prussia in her invasion of France in 1870. They also gave her an authority and influence with her ministers and Hibbert shows that, at various times in her reign, she was important. In foreign policy she helped develop close relations with France in the aftermath to Naploeon III's seizure of power ; she it was who steeled Disraeli in his Russophobic, pro-Turkish, policy during the mid-1870s; and she, not Disraeli, was the author and prime-mover of a Royal Titles Act to accord her the status of Empress of India. Her daughter, Vicky, was an Empress in Prussia and so it was important for Britain that she, too, had the title...... In domestic matters she also had an influence; she successfully refused to have Peel as her PM in 1839, and Russell in 1852 when she preferred Aberdeen; she insisted on an Act to curb the Oxford Movement Ritualists (so displeasing to a monarch who liked the simplicity of Scottish Presbyterianism) and she publicly displayed her party political partisanship by writing a telegram en clair to Gladstone (read to him- to his evident discomfort - by a stationmaster) chastising him over his sacrifice, through sheer incompetence, of General Gordon at Khartoum: 'to think all this might have been prevented, and many precious lives saved, by earlier action, is too frightful'.

This Victoria, then, was significant in 19th century English History for her continuity, for the strength of her opinions, the unconventional ways she ensured they were known, and by the extensiveness of her contacts. Hibbert shows another significance too, in that the characteristics of what we now think of as Victorianism as a cultural identity were shaped by her and her tastes: the cloying sentimentality attached to death-bed, funerals and mourning; the prurience about matters sexual (not as evident, Hibbert records with relish, at her own wedding when it was thought impossible to find 12 suitable bridesmaids whose mothers were of unblemished character); the clutter of domestic hangings, furnishings and detritus; the affection for the works of Sullivan and Tennyson.

Hibbert's biography of Queen Victoria is, then, a valuable book in putting her at the centre of her age. He wears his learning lightly, he writes with wit and style, and his current status as the doyen of popular historians will be consolidated by this timely work.

Andrew Reekes Director of Studies

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