VICTORIAN EXCESSES

Press, 10 May 1980, Page 17

VICTORIAN EXCESSES

The Secret Life of Queen Victoria. By Jonathan Routh. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980. 112 pp. $15.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) Another example of Victoria ephemera is Jonathan Routh’s “The Secret Life of Queen Victoria.” This elaborate (and expensive) literary practical joke professes to be the full account of Queen Victoria’s incognito visit to Jamaica in April and May of 1871, alias Mrs King. Although the generally accepted theory regarding Her Majesty’s disappearance from public life at that time was that she had retired to Balmoral in a sulk following yet another altercation with Mr Gladstone, Jonathan Routh suggests otherwise. The Widow of Windsor was, in fact, “getting away from it all,” in the mosUaudacious and successful effort of the ninteenth century. Accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Augustus Crosbie-Maxwell and a Mrs Maud. Beswick — who alas, was

to meet a premature and untimely end as a result of her vocal excesses — Victoria embarked upon a series of escapades which would have made poor Albert turn in his grave. Among her newfound acquaintances are Arnold Wade, a handsome American circus proprietor in whose "thoughtfulness and commanding manner I saw reflected certain of the qualities of my beloved Albert,” and the drunken Bishop Kelso, “always under the dinner table after his third bottle of claret and snapping at the servant’s ankles." Her majesty’s missing diaries, written in impeccable ’“royalese” .are illuminated with the author’s primitive-style paintings. Among the more memorable are pictures ~of the Empress of India streaking through the verdant Jamaican undergrowth, clad only in the Order of the Garter, exercising her cheetah; and doing Dwindling and Tapering Exercises with a hula hoop, accompanied by an eightpiece string orchestra.