Queen Victoria
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From a young age,
wrote extensive journals, two of which were published with great success during her lifetime. Other selections from her journals, collections of her letters, and drawings and watercolours from her sketchbooks were published posthumously.
Biography
Leonowens details the elaborate and costly ceremonials surrounding the white elephant. Her sense of their ridiculousness connects to the notion, derived from Siamese culture, of white elephants as a burdensome possession, which suggests that the ambassador's remark may have had an anti-imperial twist.
Although she was obviously an aristocrat,
's sensibilities in many respects allied her with the middle classes. She defined herself against the excesses of the Regency, and her public performance of domesticity and wifely devotion, as well as many of her tastes and opinions, helped to legitimise bourgeois values in the period that was named after her.