Antiques.

 
Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat 
upon men's minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all 
over the place haphazardly. 
H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934 

Victoria occupied the throne longer than any monarch in British history. She became queen at the age of eighteen in 1837 and died sixty-three years later in 1901. In 1840 her marriage was arranged to her first cousin Albert, a German princeling, with whom she produced nine children in twenty years. There was a sharp contrast between their tranquil, even middle-class domestic life and the ambitious nature of their descendants, who assumed the thrones of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Britain.

Victoria and Albert came to love each other with a strong physical passion, yet she hated pregnancy, childbirth, babies, and children. Despite the carefully projected image of a large, happy family, Victoria showed little warmth for her children, who predictably turned out to be unhappy, delinquent, or both.

Albert died of typhoid in 1861 at the age of forty-two, the first of a number of deaths in the family that Victoria endured with increasing gloom over the course of more than twenty years. She became so withdrawn that she alienated the politicians who had to deal with her. Overwhelmed with grief, she largely withdrew from public life, spending months at Balmoral, her retreat in the Scottish Highlands, or at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. She limited herself to consulting her ministers by mail and erecting memorials to her late husband.

During the last phase of her reign, from about 1886 onward, she resumed her interest in governing, with the consequence that her ...