Private papers and collections belonging to Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, are to be published online, throwing fresh light on his role as prince consort and influence on national life and Victorian society.
A three-year digitisation project will publish 23,500 items, some not publicly seen before, from the Royal Archives, Royal Collection and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
The project “will transform academic and public access to this unparalleled collection and will allow a fresh assessment of this influential man”, said Oliver Urquhart Irvine, a librarian and assistant keeper of the Queen’s archives.
Scheduled for completion in 2020, the first tranche will go online in the summer of 2019 to mark the bicentenary of Albert’s birth.
As prince consort and Victoria’s unofficial private secretary, Albert is credited by historians as the guide and mentor to some of the greatest national projects of his day. He was chancellor of Cambridge University, an art historian, and a collector and patron of art, architecture and design.
The second son of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Albert married Victoria, his first cousin, in 1840, and died in 1861 aged 42.
During this time Britain experienced fundamental change in social welfare, university education, government and parliamentary structures, and overseas relations. The country witnessed the rise of the railways, rapid transatlantic trade, the emergence of trade unions and the advance of Britain as a global industrial powerhouse.
One letter to be digitised on the Royal Collection Trust website is from the prince to the prime minister at the time, Lord Russell, in 1848, when Britain was hit by a recession. In it he expressed concern for 150,000 protesters who gathered on Kennington Common in south London demanding political reform and to present to parliament a petition of 6m signatures. Commenting on a recent decision to reduce building works at Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace and lay off workers, Albert wrote: “Surely this is not the time for the tax payers to economise upon the working classes!”
Material will include catalogues from the prince’s private library, inventories of paintings commissioned or collected by him, the Raphael Collection of 5,000 prints and photographs, and the significant body of early photography collected and commissioned by him of more than 10,000 photographs.
Albert and Victoria were enthusiastic supporters of the new medium of photography and in 1853 became patrons of the recently established Photographic Society. He commissioned photographs to document life in the royal household, family gatherings and visits from important guests.
Irvine said the digitisation would “enable a comprehensive study of the life, work and legacy of Prince Albert on a scale that does justice to his contribution to 19th-century Britain and the world”.
