Book Report on "Victoria and Albert"

Book Report 4 pages (1063 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Victoria and Albert by Richard Hough

Richard Hough, author of Victoria and Albert is noted British historian with a long list of credentials, including the publishing of dozens of other biographies. In Victoria and Albert he offers a dual biography of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, treating the couple almost as single subject as he explores their two decades of marriage and child rearing. This is the biography of a surprisingly typical couple despite their royal standing. Victoria and Albert are very much in love, even though their marriage was an arranged one. They have their typical arguments and their reconciliations, all the while raising their 9 children. Their story would have made an excellent reality show: "Victoria and Albert Plus 9." Sadly, Albert died from typhoid fever in 1861, but not before spending twenty glorious years with his beautiful wife.

There is no doubt that Hough is more than qualified to write this biography, and his expertise in British history provides a striking backdrop for the love story that he is chronicling. While most biographies are simply a chronological account of an individual's life, Hough does seem to actually be making a point in his biography of Victoria and Albert. The message that I believe he is intending for the reader to receive is that even a Queen and a Prince, whom many consider untouchable, are just people like the rest of us, experiencing the same trials and joys of marriage that we all experience. For example, Hough writes, "The child-bearing years brought Victoria and Albert many joys, many changes and many new stresses. They greatly enlarged Albert's responsibilities, which was excellent for him, but led to resentment in Victoria. She did not care for the delegating the powers she had enjoyed and was soon complaining about the 'unreasonable' amount of time which Albert's business took up" (172).

This passage could be describing just about any couple in the world. In fact it would be difficult to find a married couple for whom having children did not bring a combination of joy and stress. and, how many couples could claim never to have argued over the husband (or the wife) spending too much time at work and not enough quality time with the family? This is just one of numerous examples of how Hough shows the 'human' side of royalty and lets the reader know that in the end, people are just people.

In terms of the language used through the book and its appropriateness for an undergraduate curriculum, I found that Hough created just the right balance between over-sophistication and down-to-earth vernacular. The only concern I would have about this book for an undergraduate curriculum is that some of the sentences are extremely long and convoluted, making them a little bit difficult to follow.

Sometimes an entire paragraph is comprised of one sentence. For example, early on in the book Hough writes, "Leopold's own plan to counter the King's preference for the sons of the Prince of Orange and, he hoped, to please his sister and his niece, was to persuade the duchess to invite to Kensington Palace two of his nephews, Princes Ernest and Albert of… READ MORE

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