Category: Osborne House

‘With joy do I hail the return of this blessed festival,’1 wrote Queen Victoria on Christmas Eve in 1845. By this time in her life Victoria was eight years into her reign, had been married for five and was mother to four children, with her fifth child, Princess Helena, expected the following May. To Victoria,… Continue reading ‘It was a very merry Xmas’: Queen Victoria’s Christmas 1845

‘This festive day, the eve of such blessings & the day when ever since our childhood we have been happy & joyous, in giving & receiving,’ wrote Queen Victoria as she began her Christmas Ever journal entry in 1847; adding ‘I know no day, or rather more anniversary which we celebrate with more feelings of… Continue reading ‘This festive day’: Queen Victoria’s Christmas 1847

Christmas 1860 was the final happy festival to have been spent by Queen Victoria before the premature death of Prince Albert the following December. However, while this Christmas was later looked upon with sorrow, at the time, the scene captured a thriving family, who celebrated the engagement of their third child, Princess Alice to Prince… Continue reading ‘A merry happy night’: Prince Albert’s final Christmas

  Queen Victoria’s final Christmas was filled with nothing but heartache for the 81 year old monarch. 1900 had been Victoria’s annus horribilis, with the deaths of her third child, Prince Alfred, and her grandson, Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein. On top of this, the second Boer War was in full swing and the elderly… Continue reading “This has indeed been a terribly sad Christmas for us all”: Queen Victoria’s final Christmas

In the evening of 30th November 1936, the Crystal Palace was tragically destroyed by fire, exactly 85 years after it housed the 1851 Great Exhibition. Designed by botanist, Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace was made of iron beams and 300,000 panes of glass, which helped preserve the pre-existing trees in Hyde Park where the exhibition… Continue reading The Crystal Palace is destroyed by fire

Quite unusually for the time of year, on 10th March 1847 a snowstorm struck Queen Victoria’s Isle of Wight home, Osborne House. In her journal the Queen writes that it had ‘began snowing early & continued all the morning, the ground and trees being covered in snow, which I tried to make a sketch of’… Continue reading ‘The whole accident has upset us’: Tragedy strikes at Osborne House

In October 1849 Queen Victoria and her family were staying at Windsor Castle when illness spread amongst them. The first to fall ill was the thirty-year-old monarch. For seveal days the Queen had felt unwell, with aching limbs, headaches, muscle weakness and difficulty sleeping. However, on 24th October her symptoms began to worsen when a… Continue reading “Dreadful irritation, which is most unpleasant”: Queen Victoria and chickenpox