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This thesis explores Queen Victoria's queenship in nineteenth-century Britain, with a particular emphasis on the impact of her gender on her relationship with the Prime Minister in the context of the development of a constitutional monarchy operating alongside a growth in parliamentary democracy. It will be argued that various sections of society regarded her gender as a positive resource for (re)fashioning the modern form of Britain's monarchy. Femaleness was presented as facilitating orderly progress. Victoria's queenship was not only operated by the Queen herself, but also by actors surrounding her showing an active interest in and support for the monarchical institution. Agents such as members of her court, her dynastic relatives and immediate family, Prime Ministers, and a growing and increasingly active public audience (not least the print media) shaped and influenced the style of her rule. This thesis is structured chronologically, ranging from her early years, via the middle period until the last decades of her reign. Each chapter focuses on the premiership of one of three selected Prime Ministers while simultaneously engaging with three overarching themes (the notion of a symbiosis between femaleness of the sovereign and constitutional monarchy; the public feminisation of the monarch; the personal relationship between the Queen and the Prime Minister), thereby illuminating the transformations of the gender dimension of Victoria's queenship over the course of her reign. By analysing Victoria's queenship through the lens of her relationship with her male chief ministers, this thesis seeks to shed light on the significance and wider implications of the sovereign's gender on the evolving functions of Britain's constitutional monarchy within the nation's culture, society, political system, and Empire. The thesis contributes to scholarly debates surrounding Britain's monarchical persistence and popularity in a democratic age and to scholarship on women's and gender history as well as on modern queenship.

This thesis examines the political and social worldview of British and Indian royalty during the nineteenth century. Rather than viewing them as mere 'ornamental' figureheads, it seeks to highlight and scrutinise the ideas held by monarchs (sovereign or deposed) about empire and the role of royalty, as well as considering how their attempts at implementing such ideas can complicate existing narratives about the relative influence and authority of this group. Above all, this thesis breaks new ground by adopting a transnational approach in its study of such royal ideas and endeavours. Ruling dynasties, monarchs and courts have long been part of an interconnected, if rarefied, world encompassing Europe and Asia, though this is not adequately reflected in the historiography on the nineteenth century. This is despite the ironic fact that in that century, many royal houses were brought closer together than ever before, through the impact of growing global empires, and advancing communications and transportation networks. The first direct meetings between British and Indian royalty took place during this period, in the early 1850s, and are closely examined here. Based on a core case-study of the longstanding relationship between the Punjabi and British dynasties of Maharajah Ranjit Singh and Queen Victoria, and using a wide variety of textual and material sources, this thesis captures royal perspectives of their status and role in an evolving world, alongside considering how British and Indian royalty directly or indirectly influenced one another. This study effectively de-centres the British imperial official as the primary agent in Anglo-Indian elite encounters, and goes further to demonstrate that whether in the case of the connections between royal personages, or in the ties between ‘monarchy, nation and empire’, the capability for royal agency to shape the nature of such relationships evolved over time and was a consistently contested matter.

This dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican’s prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the ‘Grand Style’ aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates surrounding the parliamentary purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, in the poetry, prose, art and architecture of the 1820s and 1830s, in specific exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the anthropological debates touched off by Darwin’s Origins of Species after 1859, and in Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siécle advocacy of Dress Reform and his reformed, Reynoldsian aesthetic idealism. Particularly during Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials, the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism is inescapable, being explicitly enunciated in Wilde’s famous “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” speech, but I argue throughout that nineteenth-century British Hellenism tends to create ‘enfigurations’ of subjectivity that constrain those who adopt them through insistent reference to an ideal subjectivity that is embodied in white, abled, elite, heterosexual male bodies resembling those found in classical Greek art. Thus I show that while the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism could be contested, the terms of the debate remained fixed around an unmarked yet hypervisible central term, which fixity acted to foreclose radical political change throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly in the 1890s, when British sexological debates made the figure of the modern male homosexual visible at the same time that campaigns for tolerance of homosexuality were energetically quashed

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, literary representations of replacement maternal figures helped normalize forms of surrogate motherhood within Victorian childrearing and caregiving structures. Through cultural and literary study, this dissertation articulates the dialectical relationship that developed between fiction and society as maternal norms developed and shifted. Through an analysis of advice texts and the social influence of Queen Victoria’s performance of maternal norms, this work expands previous understandings of how motherhood came to be imagined and idealized in the early years of Victoria’s reign. It then demonstrates how literature highlights the need to revise and expand prevailing understandings of maternity. Next, it reveals how fictional surrogate mothers establish power to overcome the threats they pose to social, familial, and maternal constructions. It ultimately demonstrates that surrogate mothers help revise maternal norms by playing integral roles in enhancing the future prosperity of the middle and upper classes of England. By unmooring motherhood from biological constraints, fictional surrogate mothers call into question the intrinsic nature of dominant maternal norms and open up spaces for female social agency.

William Leighton Leitch was a watercolorist and tutor in nineteenth-century Britain. He is most famously known as being a drawing instructor to Queen Victoria. However, his prolific career is widely unacknowledged today. Through extensive research I have been able to reestablish his biography as well as analyze his body of work. His paintings can be divided roughly into two periods: early work (pre-1840) and mature work (post-1840). His early work demonstrates how the Picturesque movement in Britain affected his work and his technical proficiency in watercolor painting. In contrast, Leitch's work after 1840 distinguishes his personal style as Naturalistic. The influence Queen Victoria had on Leitch as a patron is also evident in this later period. Leitch's painting shows idealization of the landscape with the distinct character of a place. He created a harmonious balance within his paintings between the human elements and the natural. There is a sophistication to his work that distinguishes him from other professional watercolor artists and landscape artists of the period.

The personal animosity between King Edward VII of the United Kingdom and Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire is an overlooked factor in the dramatic shift in relations between the two countries during the years prior to World War I. Both men grew up in the shadow of Queen Victoria, and both had difficulties fitting into their expected roles within the family hierarchy. Edward was an unplanned child, and became the black sheep of the British Royal Family; he drank heavily and chased women. Wilhelm was caught between two worlds, English and German, and struggled to be accepted by both. One result of their common dilemma, and their vastly different responses to it, was a toxic mix of quick tempers and even quicker tongues that manifested when the men came together. This strained relationship, especially Wilhelm’s perception of it, played a direct role in the realignment of European alliances and the subsequent Anglo-German naval buildup. The foreign policies of both Germany and Great Britain during this period were colored by the personal relationship between the two monarchs and their perceptions of one another. Two key events were the death of Queen Victoria and the Russo-Japanese War. Victoria’s death marked a turning point in British foreign policy, as Edward favored France, England’s traditional enemy. The Russo-Japanese War altered the naval situation in the North Sea, forcing Britain to take measures to reestablish the balance.

Throughout the last century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's influence and reputation as an imperialist has been praised, demonized, and denied. Though always a target of considerable political criticism, Disraeli's advancement and, some might even say, invention of British imperial nationalism was celebrated by contemporary politicians, academics, and the general population who considered him "inextricably entwined" with the notion of empire. However, twentieth century historiography largely downplayed and discounted Disraeli's influence on late nineteenth century imperial British expansion by focusing not on imperialism as an ideology, but as a phenomenon of economics and power; aligning its genesis with the Industrial Revolution, and the socio-economic theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Atkinson Hobson. But, since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, which reevaluated the cultural and social relationships between the East and the West, Disraeli's impact on Britain's colonial century has yet again come to the forefront of imperial British historiography. Disraeli's rhetoric and political acumen regarding Britain's eastern empire directly (through the proclamation of Victoria's title Empress of India in 1876) and indirectly (through his assertion of Conservative Principles at the Crystal Palace in 1872) established a significant hierarchical social structure and consciousness that still pervades British culture today.