Customer Reviews

Great Queens of England: Queen Victoria [VHS]

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This film succeeds as a basic review of the Victorian Age, however the majority of experts interviewed are incredibly boring making it hard to concentrate on the content.

This DVD is okay if you just want to learn the basics of Victorian history. It does not compare to any DVD produced by the History Channel for display or imformational purposes. I was disappointed in the DVD.

I tried to showing this to my AP European History students, but the audio was just to difficult to understand. Loud background music and thick British accents made it nearly impossible to understand what the narrator was saying. At one point, one of my students asked if we could turn on the captions just so she could understand what was being said! The production was just not very well done.

Queen Victoria of England lent her name to the greatest period of British history. During her reign, the British Empire expanded out to rule over one-fourth of the land on Earth. The economic reach was even more significant, the percentages of the worldwide production of certain manufactured goods that was produced in Britain is amazing. Her control of the seas was unchallenged, and there seemed to be no end to the glory of her majesty's Empire.
Unlike so many other royal unions, her marriage to Prince Albert was a very happy one. He was an extraordinarily tolerant man, having to bear up to initial public displeasure and be thought of as the husband of the queen rather than a man in his own right. He died early, and Victoria largely withdrew from public life after that. It is hardly a surprise that Victoria could not keep up with the changes during her reign; few people could have managed to deal with the dramatic changes that the Industrial Revolution had on England. However, the advantages of being first mover were so great that they largely explain why England grew to such early dominance.
By using period imagery and some dramatic re-creations, the producers of this tape capture the changes in England and the life of Queen Victoria. It is impossible to understand Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without understanding the impact that Victoria had on England and the world. Like so many other monarchs, she was largely out of the flow of historical events, as it was the self-serving adventurers who expanded her empire. In the end, she was a great queen because it was a great era for England; the power they had may have been unrivaled throughout history. Not even the Roman Empire controlled the world like the England of Victoria's time. It is a tape that should be viewed by all classes studying the Victorian era and how Europe and the world was changing.