Discussion Series / Victoria

Double

In cleaning up the page, I've noticed this wall-of-text under "Reality Is Unrealistic", can we cut this down at all? (note that I've never actually watched this series, I just clean-up when I notice a page in need)

• While a relationship-bordering-on-romance between 18/19-year old Victoria and near 60-year-old Lord M is enhanced a bit for TV (having a much-younger actor playing Lord M helps, historians generally regarded the relationship as father-daughter (Weintraub, Longford, Hibbert, Hough, Woodham-Smith, Plowden, Macdonald) and Victoria herself frequently refers to him as such. Historians also generally note the political motivation behind Lord Melbourne, who instigated both the Lady Flora affair and Bedchamber Crisis, insisting to Victoria even after Flora's bodily invasion she was pregnant (this is contrary to the TV show, which shows Melbourne as cautioning Victoria about her claims.) Although such May-December Romances are often frowned upon in the modern era, especially when celebrities are involved, in Victoria's time it was not uncommon for people with such wide ranges in age to marry. Indeed, several histories chronicle a mad dash by 50-something relations of George III and William IV to marry and have male children by, in some cases, very young women in order to secure their place in the line of succession when it became clear that there would be no direct male heir to the current monarch (with the Duke of Kent, Victoria's father, the winner). However, marriage between the Queen and a non-royal would have never been allowed in those days, making Victoria's attempted marriage proposal on Lord M unlikely to have succeeded (although the series did establish that Victoria was considering maintaining a non-married relationship, with unambiguous comparisons made to the unmarried Elizabeth I's relationship to the Earl of Leicester; the series also touched on why taking the attitude "I'm the monarch, I make the rules" was not realistic). A dissenter of the idea it was not a romance is Daily Mail journalist A.N. Wilson, though Elizabeth Longford is often misquoted as calling the relationship as a romance when in fact she called it "one of the great platonic love stories of history.' Whatever the case, Victoria would later write after Melbourne was no longer her PM, "1st October, 1842. Wrote & looked over & corrected my old journals, which do not now awake very pleasant feelings. The life I led then was so artificial & superficial, & yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I now know what real happiness means."

There's also this Truth in Television example:

• Beyond the usual amount of fictionalization and rearranging of events that is inevitable in any biographical production, of particular debate among some fans is the veracity of the romanticizing of the Lord Melbourne-Victoria relationship. In the series, the much-older Lord M clearly falls for the young queen, and Victoria becomes so dependent upon Lord M that she prevents a new government from being formed in order to get him back as Prime Minister and, later, travels to visit him alone at his family home with the intent to propose marriage. Academic scholarship (Wientraub, Longford, Hibbert, Hough, Woodham-Smith, Plowden, Macdonald)generally regard Victoria's relationship with Lord Melbourne as fatherly-daughter, as Victoria calls him in her diaries frequently. The Daily Mail journalist A.N. Wilson in his biography of Victoria (which the show is partly based on) claims Victoria and Lord Melbourne were more than father-daughter, but this is not the consensus among actual academicians. The fact it was for a time an Intergenerational Friendship, with Victoria's diaries continually referring to the two discussing personal interests and things as mundane as hairstyles and looking at paintings together, is not denied by anyone. Victoria's diaries after 1840 are available in almost complete form, and Charles Greville - who called Victoria's relationship with Victoria sexual - actively hated Victoria, who was distressed when his gossipy and often inaccurate diaries about her was released. Whatever the case, it is interesting to note her feelings only a couple years after marrying Albert: "The next day she (Victoria) pulled down some of her old diaries, perhaps to recall Lezhen’s part of her life, and came to a passage in 1839 where she had written of her ‘happiness’ with Melbourne. Now, with both Melbourne and Lezhen gone she noted ‘1st October, 1842. Wrote & looked over & corrected my old journals, which do not now awake very pleasant feelings. The life I led then was so artificial & superficial, & yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I now know what real happiness means." (Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert By Stanley Weintraub)

I now I asked this before, but it's getting pretty confusing having the novel and series mixed together when they are totally unrelated and there is also a novel called Victoria based upon the TV series that I fear might start getting indexed by some people in the same categories as the other Victoria novel. Is it possible for someone with admin privileges to split these up in some way?

The YMMV and Nightmare Fuel links go to discussion about a novel called Victoria that is completely unrelated to the TV series. There is in fact a novel upon which the TV series is based as well, so things could get even more confusing.

The subheads for Literature, Wrestling and YMMV apply to other uses of the name Victoria. Is there any way of separating them out? In particular people may start adding series-related YMMV items.