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Mourning and its place in psychiatric nosology has been a source of debate among psychiatrists at least since Freud. The Victorian origin of the interest in this malady may well be attributed to the dramatic bereavement of Queen Victoria when she lost Prince Albert in the prime of her life.
By Dilip Ramchandani, M.D.
The psychiatric syndrome of pathological grief, some believe, is derived from the vivid 19th century accounts of young, aristocratic women of beauty and intelligence who suffered a catastrophic disappointment such as bereavement or callous rejection by a lover. Although many psychiatrists, beginning with Freud, have attempted to legitimize these early accounts by developing complicated constructs of psychopathology, the mainstream psychiatric establishment has allowed only a begrudging recognition of this condition as evidenced by a V code entry in the DSM. Lack of official psychiatric recognition notwithstanding, the syndrome clearly has the ability to tap into the subconscious imagery of the popular culture. The cinematic success of "Her Majesty Mrs. Brown," which is loosely based on the story of Queen Victoria’s bereavement, attests to this assertion.
As a young queen, Victoria was amiably unfashionable and unstylish. When crowned in 1837 at the age of 18, she did not impress her countrymen with her wisdom or skill in statecraft. In fact, following her wedding in 1840, she was content to sport an air of domesticity and mother-liness while she left the task of daily management of state and court affairs to her dour consort, Prince Albert. He was brilliant and efficient but not popular. However, the Queen admired and adored her husband and found comfort in depending upon someone as emotionally unharried as he. Unfortunately, Prince Albert died, possibly of typhoid, suddenly in 1861.
The unprepared Victoria reacted dramatically. This was not entirely unexpected because she was a rather emotional and passionate woman. She wailed and moaned incessantly and refused to see anyone but her children and a few others as one week passed into the next. She became self-absorbed and so reclusive that she did not make her first public appearance until two and a half years after Albert’s death. She developed an aversion to the company of her oldest son, Edward, the Prince of Wales, because she convinced herself that his undisciplined behavior had grieved his father and contributed to his demise. However, she took a fancy to her husband’s outspoken gamekeeper, John Brown. The intensity of her loyalty to Brown, of course, has been a subject of many rumors and caused distress for many of her family and ministers.
According to chronicled accounts of life in her court and castles, the Queen ordered a photograph of the corpse of Prince Albert lying in state to be hung a foot above the pillow on the unoccupied side of every bed in which she slept. She asked that a clean nightshirt be placed on her late husband’s side of the bed and a can of hot water in his basin. Often, she talked about him as if he were in the next room and was occasionally found clutching the nightshirt years after his death. She suffered no object to be shifted from its position on the night of Prince Albert’s death in any of her private rooms. Servants were supplied with photographs of all angles of the Prince’s rooms so that when they dusted, they could replace all objects exactly as before. She ordered the 52 women on the estate at Osborne to be issued yards and yards of black material to make themselves dresses, scarf shawls, and ribbons. She herself wore a crinoline gown that never changed in design for the rest of her life. She died in 1901, 40 years after the Prince’s death.
To her visitors, the household at Osborne, which incidentally was designed by Albert, seemed like "Pompeii—the life suddenly extinguished." The courtiers in the palace led a hushed existence and communicated with each other by passing notes from room to room. The memorials and images of Albert were so ubiquitous that Charles Dickens was driven to write to a friend, "If you should meet with an inaccessible cave anywhere in the neighborhood, to which a hermit could retire from the memory of Prince Albert, pray let me know of it."
Interestingly, however, the most effective phase of her reign came after the Prince’s death. Her royal personality flowered. Despite the eccentricities, strange imaginings, and unreasonable impulses, she developed a confident persona and weathered the political and military storms of the late 19th century with aplomb and success. Therefore, it is tempting to consider that the seemingly pathological attachment to and identification with her intensely loved and lost husband may have, paradoxically, served to mend the lacunae in her immature early personality. Indeed, she reportedly told a lady in waiting that she had always disliked politics but had tried to keep up the interest for his sake, judging everything by what he would have done or wished. Thus, even as the unfortunate and untimely loss was a source of unending personal turmoil to "La Bonne Mêre de Famille," as the French somewhat derisively called her in the early years of her reign, it may have helped her adapt to the rigorous demands of her role in a crucial period in British history.