ABSTRACT
Cultural historians noting the persistent popularity of the British monarchy and royal family set out to analyze Victoria's insistent presence in Victorian visual and print culture. Extensive coverage of the queen and her family as domestic, middle class, civic-minded, and generously philanthropic were key in establishing the popular image of the bourgeois monarchy. Photography became a key genre in representations of the monarch. The 1860s began a very different phase of Victoria's monarchy, in which the queen withdrew from public life, with significant consequences. Republicanism and anti-monarchism in all their various forms were strongest in the early 1870s. As the constitutional role and political power of the monarchy declined, Victoria and Albert consciously created a royal philanthropic presence that helped them to retain respectability, prestige, and influence. In the Bedchamber Crisis and elsewhere, Queen Victoria worked to maintain a degree of monarchical power within the new political reality by locating herself above politics.
