Kensington Palace and Queen Victoria

A view of the bedroom in which Queen Victoria was born, in 1819.

My favorite book about Queen Victoria is Gillian Gill’s We Two, which is mainly about her marriage (the subtitle is Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals), but also does a wonderful job of telling the story of how she came to be heir to the throne and what her childhood was like. The best biographies read like good fiction, and this book falls into that category.

Kensington Palace, like so many other of my London destinations, has much more to offer than one can see in a day. I focused on Queen Victoria primarily: the part of the palace in which she was born and grew up—and from which she quickly departed when she became Queen of England. She couldn’t wait to get out of the place, and, aware of her story, one can’t blame her.

Still, her mother loved her dearly, as gifts and notes attest, and while the young princess rarely enjoyed the company of other children (not to mention many of her English relatives), she did have some nice playthings. For more information about her life, I highly recommend the book. For now, I’m just going to share some bits of the world she lived in. I believe that seeing items like these give us a little better understanding of Victoria as a human being, a little girl, an adolescent. I’ll touch on her later life in another blog post.

The cards explain the photos, for the most part, but I’ll add a couple of notes. Victoria’s Uncle Leopold had been married to the Princess Charlotte, King George IV’s only legitimate child. There’s quite a bit about him in We Two, and I often wonder if, had Charlotte not died in childbirth, he would have been the same sort of Prince Consort as his nephew Albert. In any case, Leopold became the first King of the Belgians in 1831. He married again in 1832. This picture of his bride, Louise of Orléans, appeared in numerous ladies’ magazines that year.

As I’ve mentioned before, photographing works of art in museums and historic sites can be challenging, mainly because of lighting conditions. You can get a non-glare view of the painting of thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria here at the Royal Collection Trust.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

You’d think, given all the research I did for Mr. Impossible—not to mention my lifelong fascination with Egyptology—that I would have known all about the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaelogy. But I wrote that book quite a few years ago, when most of my research happened with books, and what was available online, while immensely helpful, wasn’t a fraction of what we find today.

That has to explain why it was such a surprise to discover it—by accident, no less—while looking for another museum around the corner, also part of University College London. The collection includes more than 80,000 objects. We did as much as we could in two phases, before and after lunch, and the boatload of photos below, will, I hope, give you an idea of what’s there.

Amelia Edwards, whose bust and book appear in the photo gallery, was an important source for me. The museum notes, as I realized while writing my book, that her attitude and prejudices reflect her time. This is bound to happen with research. So the trick is to aim for authenticity with hints here and there of the attitudes—because they offer important insights into the times—but to keep the not-so-pleasant stuff subdued. At the same time, I do try not to sound too 21st century, because I don’t want to jar readers out of the world I’ve created. Still, all writers reflect their times. That’s as true of me as it is of Amelia Edwards or any of the numerous other authors whose work I consulted.

As to the artifacts: The museum doesn’t have an elaborate guidebook, so the information is limited to what we (meaning my husband, under my command) could photograph, and I am not an Egyptologist, so I can’t offer further enlightenment. I can tell you one thing: Generally speaking, it’s believed that the shabtis—those little figurines—were meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife.

Again, you will find very brief videos on my Facebook and Instagram Author pages.

The Foundling Museum

Reporting from London:

Maybe this should start with a trigger warning, as the topic is abandoned infants, it starts in the early 1700s, and the picture isn’t pretty. Let me tell you that I wept. So, if you’re still with me, here goes.

Charles Dickens introduced me to Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Little Dorrit. In a time when there was, essentially, nothing in the way of birth control, a great many impoverished women ended up abandoning their babies on the streets of London. By the thousands. Thomas Coram, who’d made his fortune in the shipping trade in America, was horrified at what he saw. No doubt he wasn’t the only one, but he felt he had to do something about it. And so he campaigned for years, and eventually, with the help of a number of prominent people, and, finally, the King’s permission, in 1739 founded a hospital or home for these children.

The idea was, the babies would be left at the hospital with some sort of token identifying them, so that the parent could reclaim the child when/if able to support him or her. In reality, very few children were reclaimed. They were, however, cared for, and given some sort of training that would allow them to become apprenticed or go into domestic work when they were old enough. At the time, 14 was old enough.

No, it wasn’t an ideal situation. Conditions being what they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, many children did not survive. But the Foundling Hospital saved the lives of thousands of children, and in many cases allowed them to have a better adulthood than they might have otherwise expected. For the full story, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article here.

I visited the Foundling Museum on a beautiful, sunny day. Nearby, children played football (U.S. soccer) in a park, reminding us that life, while not perfect now, is better than it was.

The museum comprises three floors. The ground floor focuses on the collections of artifacts related to the children, from the earliest days of the organization to the 20th century, when the hospital was relocated to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. You can listen to audio accounts from some of these former residents.

The next floor contains reconstructions of some of the original rooms of the hospital, and includes many of its works of art. That collection is a story in itself. With art donated by the artists, it became the first public art gallery in the U.K., and a fashionable charity.

The topmost floor contains the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. There I sat for a while in one of the armchairs with built-in speakers and listened to Handel’s music to quiet my soul.