The Last Days of Glory The Death of Queen Victoria

by Rennell, Tony

• ISBN13: 9780312276720
• ISBN10: 0312276729
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-25
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 shook Britain to its core, and reverberated not just throughout the Commonwealth, but around the world. She was a woman in her eighties, and yet it seems no one could contemplate the end of a reign that had lasted so long. Most could not remember a time when she was not Queen, and the very stability of everyday life seemed to depend on her regency. The anxiety of the government and the royal family about the prospect of the Queen's death was such that the news of her illness was deliberately concealed from the public for more than a week. When it came, people from England to Jamaica wept in the streets, and this grief was surpassed only by fear for the future. "God help us" was the standard reaction from all strata of society. Last Days of Glory is the definitive account of those last 23 days in January 1901, when Victoria traveled to Osborne House to die. The momentous reaction to the Queen's passing attached to it more significance and a greater sense of change than the turn of the century had carried just a year earlier. Through the prism of those last days Tony Rennell presents us with a series of resonant and absorbing snapshots of a fading Empire at the end of the Victorian Age, and captures a nation coping with change, balancing comfortable nostalgia with the arrival of a new order.

Author Biography

Tony Rennell was an Associate Editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times before becoming a freelance writer. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Preface	1	(6)
The Eyes Grow Dim	7	(25)
Trials and Anxieties	32	(26)
Whispers and Denials	58	(21)
The News Breaks	79	(24)
Clinging On	103	(26)
Sunset	129	(19)
A World in Shock	148	(18)
Secret Last Wishes	166	(28)
In Memoriam	194	(28)
Crossing the Bar	222	(25)
The People's Farewell	247	(22)
Reunited	269	(19)
Epilogue	288	(6)
Appendix	294	(7)
Sources and Notes	301	(11)
Bibliography	312	(4)
Index	316