Today we can tweet and update our statuses about our every day activities, for instances a tweet like “Just left my house, and its raining outside…#wishIworearaincoatSMH” is normal nowadays.
Back in the Victorian Era, a tweet would mean the noise a bird made and a status update would be breaking news on a well-known aristocrat.
Queen Victoria, who reigned over the United Kingdom, Ireland and India from 1837 to 1876, had her own version of tagging her family and friends. During her rule, the Queen drew over 60 sketches of the Royal Family in their most personal moments away from the public eye. Every picture also came with a handwritten caption such as ‘Before Going to Bed’ under a sketch of her three children taking a bath.
To Victoria’s dismay, an apprentice to the Queen’s print maker leaked the drawings to a journalist who planned on publishing them to the press, revealing the most intimate moments of the Royal Family.
Once the news of the leak came to her, Queen Victoria did what any monarch would do. She went to the courts and had them stop the publishing of her sketches. Her censoring of the press was one of the first such cases of its kind.
150 years later, high profile public celebrities are still rattling the press over articles about their private lives. But for the first time since the Queen’s reign, the public will get to see her sketches, which Victoria held so dearly.
Six copies of the sketches were found in an anonymous man’s attic. Now the copies will be sold for about $2,300 at Dominic Winter Book Auctions in Cirencester on Jan. 25.
Queen Victoria’s captioned sketches would have been at home in the 21st century. I could see her tweeting a photo of her sketch with the description: “Princess Alice won’t go to bed #badheirday”
Source: Daily Mail
