Queen Victoria’s impact on Canada is worth remembering
When Queen Victoria died on Jan. 22, 1901, the Calgary Herald editorialized that “the greatest personality of modern times has passed away. For 64 years her influence has been felt by the millions of people of the British Empire and it is now almost impossible to believe that the object of so much devotion and loyalty is really dead.”
Historian Charlotte Gray writes in her biography of Isabel King, mother of the late prime minister Mackenzie King, that when the Queen died, “there was such a stampede into fashionable mourning that Eaton’s ran out of ladies’ black gloves.”
Time has dimmed her aura, so that now, 110 years after her death, like one of those wordassociation tests, what comes instantly to mind at the mention of Queen Victoria is “May long weekend.”
The Queen’s 64-year reign was so much more than a long weekend in May, and today is an appropriate occasion to reflect on that.
She was born May 24, 1819, and reigned from 1837 until her death. She was 18 when she ascended to the throne and mused, “Today is my 18th birthday! How old and yet how far am I from being what I should be. I shall from this day take the firm resolution to study with renewed assiduity, to keep my attention always well fixed on whatever I am about, and to strive to become every day less trifling and more fit for what, if Heaven wills it, I’m some day to be.”
The Victorian era is today regarded as a time of great prudery, obsessively straitened morality, ornate and overblown decors, and quaint customs and attitudes, but the Herald, on the day after the Queen’s death, labelled it “the most progressive epoch since the world began.” It was the era of the Industrial Revolution and it had been filled with the spirit of scientific inquiry, a flurry of invention and a blossoming of culture.
The Victorian era was also the time period that saw the birth of Canada. So devoted were 19th century Canadians to their monarch that they considered “Victorialand” as the new name for their country after Confederation. They also left a record of their affection in city names such as Victoria and Regina, as well as the Royal Victoria Hospital and Victoria Bridge in Montreal, Queen’s University in Kingston and Victoria Street in Toronto, to name just a few.
“Old fat chops, I used to call her. She had a fat face,” Bessie Roffey, of High River, who died at 111 in 2008, told the Edmonton Journal just before her death. As a child in Britain, Roffey had often seen Queen Victoria pass by on her travels through London.
The Herald waxed somewhat more grandiloquent than Roffey, declaring at the Queen’s passing: “It is not too much to say that Queen Victoria was the greatest personality of modern history.”
Many great personalities have come and gone in the century since those words were written, but in 2011, Queen Victoria still deserves to be remembered as something more meaningful to us as Canadians connected with our country’s history, than merely the reason for a Monday off work.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/More+than+Monday/4825807/story.html#ixzz1NOKAzXim
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