The publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in 1918 was a tremendous success. In it, Strachey looked at four iconic figures of the Victorian Age and punctured the hagiographical illusions surrounding them. It seems only fitting that he should follow up in 1921 with a similarly unsentimental but fair biography of the person at the pinnacle of that era, Queen Victoria herself. Thoroughly researched, with his references documented in hundreds of footnotes, Strachey looks at the life of the young woman who, when she was born, was by no means certain to become the British monarch. He also spends considerable time on her consort, Prince Albert, who, in Strachey’s telling, develops from a careless youth to becoming a truly remarkable and effective figure in British society, while continuing to be generally perceived as an outsider. Strachey’s sardonic and witty style makes this account of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert an entertaining and very informative read. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

War opened and closed Scotland's greatest century: a pitiless part in the defeat of Naploeon in 1815, a huge blood-sacrifice for the sake of victory from 1914. In between came the greatest contributions to the progress and happiness of the rest of mankind that the Scots have ever made - in everything from the combine harvester to the mackintosh to anaesthesia. It was a supremely successful achieving society yet one not without deep flaws, in its urban poverty, its destruction of the environment, its religious intolerance, its moral hypocrisy, its crushing of Highland culture. Michael Fry shows, with an emphasis always on the human story, how a succession of deep crises undermined the usually tranquil and prosperous surface of life in Victorian Scotland to leave a legacy of paradox that the modern nation has even today yet to overcome.