Happy Victoria Day!

          The twenty-fourth of May’s
          The Queen’s birthday.
          If you don’t give us a holiday
          We’ll all run away.

Around our house in the 1950s, my father sang this ditty from his childhood to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It referred not to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II but to Queen Victoria, who died eleven years before Dad was born. Victoria Day is still a Canadian federal holiday, observed the Monday before May 25 in many of the informal ways Americans observe Memorial Day a week later.

Why Victoria? Reigning from 1837 to 1901, she was the longest-ruling British monarch until Elizabeth (1952-2022). Those years saw tremendous societal, political, and industrial changes. Much work that had once been a family enterprise moved outside the home for a growing, urban middle class. Home was seen as a place of respite from the sordid outside world. Gender roles solidified. Talk of sex was taboo (though discrete prostitution thrived). Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, held up the ideal of the perfect family.

Last month the royal family marked the hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, April 21, 1926. I can’t help but wonder how future generations will look back on her era.

Image: Heinrich von Angeli, portrait of Queen Victoria, 1875, in Royal Collection Trust. Cropped.