![]() This timing was certainly to everyone’s benefit. Queen Victoria died two decades before the publication of Strachey’s 1921 biography, titled, simply, Queen Victoria. Discretion was a crucial attribute, its lack a gaping, irreconcilable absence likely to result in one’s exclusion from future palace dinner parties. Or perhaps it merely indicates that commoners were denied the privilege of feeling at ease in her royal presence as such, telling the wrong cheeky joke was a sign of grave presumption. This mortal social wound-being branded as indiscreet by Her Majesty-implies the value she placed upon its opposing quality, discretion. The transgressor shuddered into silence, while the awful “We are not amused” annihilated the dinner table…The Queen would observe that the person in question was, she very much feared, “not discreet”: it was a verdict from which there was no appeal. ![]() ![]() The royal lips sank down at the corners, the royal eyes stared in astonished protrusion, and in fact the royal countenance became inauspicious in the highest degree. ![]() Near the end of his best-selling biography of Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey delivers a sketch of her notoriously chilling response to social blunders, should one be committed in her midst: ![]()
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