Customer Reviews
A wonderful photo collection - By: , 21 Jan 2003 
Charlotte Zeepvat has brought together a lovely set of royal photographs. Anyone with an interestin European royalty should think about buying this book. The numerous family groups show well the relationships between the many European royal houses pre 1918 & the post 1918 ones are interesting glimpses ofwhat happened to them, especially the German ones who lost their thrones & so are not as easy to find pictures of. There are also lovely shots of individuals. I especially liked the children, showing nursery life through the Victorian & Edwardian years. Particularly poignant were those of children, full of promise but destined never to grow up such as Princes Sigismund & Waldemar of Prussia & Prince Friedrich Wilhelm & Princess Marie of Hesse. Altogether a wonderful history of an age & of historical interest to even the non-royal enthusiast.
A magnificent collection of royal photographs - By: T. E. Martin (martinwirral@aol.com), 21 Jul 2001 "Queen Victoria's Family: A Century of Photographs 1840-1940" is a treasure trove of over three hundred pictures, the majority from Charlotte Zeepvat's personal hoard. The author's introduction traces the relationship of family & photography. The young Queen, newly married to Prince Albert, took a keen interestin the imaging process pioneered by Louis Daguerre. William Henry Fox Talbot was soon to patent the Calotype method that produced the first negatives making it possible for multiple images to be created from a single exposure. Henry Collen used this process to take the first known photographs of the Queenin 1844 or '45. A decade on, the Calotype was surpassed by the novel technique of André Diserda. Ms Zeepvat explains how Diserda's means of taking several different exposures on a single plate to produce a sheet of small images popularised & commercialised royal photography as the first carte-de-vistes were followed by the cabinet photograph & the postcard. This book is testimony to frequent close encounters of court & camera. Ms Zeepvat's readers observe the development of the family from the infancy of Vicky & Bertie, the future Kaiserin Friedrich & King Edward VII to the babyhood of Daisy & Tino, the present Queen Margrethe II of Denmark & the exiled King Constantine II of the Hellenes. Page after page, even the most avid royal history enthusiast will come across something unseenin any previous publication.
Ms Zeepvat's introduction emphasizes the network of royal relationships depictedin the photographs that follow. The personalitiesin each picture are identifiedin the accompanying text, which often includes detailed descriptions, apt character sketches, & the most telling of anecdotes. The author keeps the personalitiesin the photographsin the context of a widespread family by including a full index & three double pages of genealogical data. It is perhaps pernickety of me, but I regret Ms Zeepvat's equally pernickety decision to exclude the names of siblings born after 1940. For example, Queen Sofia of Spain & King Constantine of the Hellenes are included but their younger sister Princess Irene of Greece & Denmark is not. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden & his youngest sister, Princess Christina, are omitted from the branch that includes their older siblings. The younger sisters of Queen Margrethe of Denmark are likewise pruned from the family tree. These omissions seem likely to mislead readers unfamiliar with every branch of Queen Victoria's family. Anyone who wishes to know more of the genealogy of the personalitiesin Ms Zeepvat's book would make a wise purchasein "Queen Victoria's Descendants" by Marlene A. Eilers where they will find a wealth of data & other riches.
Ms Zeepvat shows us Queen Victoria's family amid the white lace & promises of engagements & weddings and, such is her eye for the minutiae of royalty, we peep into little-known relationships that never reached the altar. The reader glimpses both the formality & the hurly-burly of royal lifein what Ms Zeepvat presents as a working family peopled with writers, painters, sculptors, & musicians, nurses, sportsmen & soldiers as well as the 'full-time' royal. The sections on illness & death & the Great War are poignantin their depiction of the royal haemophiliacs, sufferers of porphyria, & the young victims of a bloodstained Europein which Victoria's family was cruelly divided. The pages dealing with the years of l'entre deux guerres portray the healing of some of the wounds of war with the marriages of the Russian Grand Duchesses Kira Kirillovna & Maria Kirillovna to German princes, a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria & a descendant of her half-sister. Around the same time, we witness four Greek princesses marry into German dynasties, three of which were also part of the Queen's family, raising a new generation before the outbreak of war would tear Victoria's family apart for the second timein the twentieth century & have unanticipated repercussions long after 1940 when their brother married the future Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.
"Queen Victoria's Family" is an essential addition to any collection of books on royaltyin the nineteenth & twentieth centuries & even that statement falls short of defining its worth. This is a book with an appeal beyond royal history. Although Ms Zeepvat's account of photographic history is brief, the book will fascinate anyone with an interestin this area. The combination of stability & changein fashion will catch the eye of the specialistin this developing field of history. It is fascinating to observe the bonnets & crinolines of Victoria & her older daughters give way to the elegant simplicity of the cloche hats & loose day dresses worn by Lady Patricia Ramsay & Queen Helen of Romaniain the twenties & thirties. In contrast, children's clothing changed littlein the course of the century. The kilt which Queen Victoria's family helped popularize remainsin vogue throughout the book, worn by Princes Arthur & Leopoldin 1861 & by Prince Arthur's grandson, Alexander Ramsay,in the late twenties Similarly, the sailor suits worn by Princes Moritz & Heinrich of Hesse-Casselin the early thirties mirror that worn by Bertie, Prince of Walesin 1846. It is only when we reach the end of the thirties that the photographs indicate a shift toward informality. In 1937, Princes Ludwig & Alexander of Hesse-Darmstadt, photographed shortly before their deathsin an aeroplane crash, wear casual jumpers & shorts to drive their model cars. This enthralling collection is polished off with an equally informal image of a prince with a happier future. Royal photographs do not come much more cheerful than that of the future King Harald V Norway as a toothy toddler, well wrapped against the cold, grinning into the lens beneath his outsize bobble-hat.
"Queen Victoria's Family" is the most comprehensive volume of its kind I have come across. It is not only a book to buy for yourself but makes an ideal gift. Treat yourself to this treasure. And treat a friend!
an enchanting book - By: , 11 May 2001 This is a wonderful volume. The lay out is such that one feels one is peeking into a private photo album. The photos are well chosen & enchanting, & the thumb nail sketches which accompany each picture are just the right length. Despite their brevity they are also very poignant, asin the chapter about war, when cousin fought cousin, brother-in-law fought brother-in-law & so on. The insight the reader gains into the Victorian royal way of life is superb. This is Charlotte Zeepvat's best book yet. Well done to her for letting us glimpse these rare snaps rather than sticking to the usual plates one usually seesin royal biographies.
