The two sisters frequently discussed marriage and motherhood in their correspondence as well. The work people have nothing to do, the merchants can sell nothing, the factories have nothing to occupy their work people with and are obliged to dismiss them.” Victoria and Feodora also corresponded with one another about the books they read, and shared an admiration for the works of Charles Dickens. “At all hours of the day, young men are walking about in the streets doing nothing. “Never was such a state of lawless ‘vagabondage’ as there is now all over Germany more or less,” Feodora wrote. On 3 April 1848, Feodora wrote from Stuttgart about the political upheaval during the ‘ Year of Revolutions’ surrounding the debate concerning the election of National Assembly for Württemberg (which Ernst attended). As Feodora was based in Germany, she could keep Victoria informed about events in continental Europe. As Feodora’s biographer Harold A Albert observed, “She reasoned with Victoria, argued with her, persuaded her and occasionally quarrelled with her”.
Victoria and Feodora corresponded regularly throughout their lives, turning to one another for advice and support. (Image by Alamy) Victoria and Feodora: what was their relationship like? Did Queen Victoria have an unhappy childhood? Read more about the future monarch’s life under the ‘Kensington System’įeodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg with her daughter Princess Adelaide.Not to have enjoyed the pleasure of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard… I escaped some years of imprisonment, which you my poor darling sister, had to endure after I was married.”įeodora shared Victoria’s dislike of Conroy and encouraged Victoria’s efforts to assume greater independence from their mother’s control as she grew older in contrast with their brother Carl, who favoured an extended regency by the Duchess of Kent. “When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest in my life, from fourteen to twenty, I cannot help pitying myself. Like Victoria, Feodora resented being isolated at Kensington Palace during her youth by the widowed Duchess of Kent and her financial advisor John Conroy. Feodora later wrote to Victoria, “I loved our father… I loved him dearly” and mourned his death in 1820. The Duke of Kent enjoyed the company of children and treated Carl and Feodora as his own.
As a child the future Queen Victoria (above) often walked in Kensington Gardens with her half-sister, Princess Feodora.
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