In the course of the past decade, I have drafted, and in part published, a series of topical essays involving Queen Victoria as symbol, as personality, and as actor on the political stage, and this paper constitutes a consideration of yet another facet of her world. Yet, when one reflects on the fact that the best-known wedding and the most traumatic funeral of the twentieth century both involved the British monarchy in a very immediate fashion, then one can hardly contend that that institution is of no account in modern cultural history. To a surprising degree, indeed, the subject has been left to non-professionals or to non-historians. The subject of monarchy remains more fashionable in the pages of People and the National Inquirer than among NEH peer review panelists or professional historians generally.
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