ENGLAND BECAME HER Review

• Published in: New York Times
• Main Authors: Henkle, Roger B, Roger B. Henkle teaches English at Brown University and is the author of "Comedy and Culture: England 1820-1900."
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y New York Times Company 22.03.1987
• Edition: Late Edition (East Coast)
• Subjects: HENKLE, ROGER B; Strachey, Lytton; Weintraub, Stanley
• ISSN: 0362-4331

So problematic a world figure would seem to require a plot, something more than a compendium of royal activities and personal vagaries. Mr. [Stanley Weintraub] seeks to give his account such a shape by opening with the Jubilee celebrations in 1887. He poses these festivities against the social unrest of an England in which the great hopes of progress appeared to have soured. Peeresses riding to a court event might read billboards asking money for hospital beds, or Victoria herself see signs for ''Bread or Blood.'' The dynamic of an England undergoing the wrenching changes of capitalism, imperialism and democratization could be set against the frequently moody Queen's evolving role and personality. ''Victoria,'' however, discards that kind of schematic to give us instead a prodigious array of information. It is a busy work, though often presented crisply and with vitality. Like quintessential Victorian furniture, it is lavishly, excessively inlaid with the scenes and bric-a-brac of incidental facts. AT times the account recalls those biographies of a more peremptory royal court, of Elizabeth I and Essex, say, when connivance among courtiers took precedence over the state of the people. In a three-paragraph sequence we pass from Victoria's preoccupation with near civil war in Portugal (one can almost imagine a Shakespearean line, ''Portugal doth vex the Queen''), to the Irish famine (then at its worst), to Albert's plans for an Italianate design in the gardens around Osborne House, the royal seaside retreat.