Melanie McDonagh: It’s Downton-style telly but reveals the real Queen Victoria

So, no prizes for guessing where we’re all going to be this Sunday evening at 9pm, is there? Glued to our tellies, that’s where. The new ITV series Victoria kicks off then with Jenna Coleman (Doctor Who’s Clara to you) as the young Victoria and — be still my beating heart! — Rufus Sewell as her ageing, worldly prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who has a bit of a thing for the young queen. And next Sunday it’ll go head to head against Poldark. Tricky.

The series occupies, obviously, the Sunday-evening Downton slot, without the shame. This is costume drama, only it’s history, so it’s respectable, see? It’s got a good, entirely fictional, Upstairs Downstairs narrative going (spoiler: the housekeeper and butler at Buck House are flogging the Queen’s old gloves and wax candles for sordid gain) — as well as the actual history.

And the history is sound; the adviser to the series being A N Wilson, whose admirable biography of the monarch underpins the whole thing. As he observes, the series “restores the real thing”, that is to say, the real Victoria, rather than the imagined one.

That’s a necessary exercise. There are a number of reasons why our perceptions of Victoria, perhaps the most important woman in English history, are so wildly at odds with reality.

One problem is that the remaking of Victoria’s image began right after her death, when her son Bertie, who detested her, went through her papers and possessions, destroying anything that he didn’t like the look of.

The other is that our concept of Victoria is obscured by Victorianism. That is to say, we project all our prejudices about the age — puritanical, jingoistic, hidebound about sex — on to the woman who gave her name to it. Yet almost none of these things is true of Victoria, especially in her youth.

Like the young Jane Austen, she was in fact a child of the Regency era. Her royal uncles’ home lives — only one of them features in the programme — were rackety, with their irregular unions blessed with umpteen bastard children. Victoria grew up in a period that was unprudish about sex, though that’s not wholly evident here.

There are other ways in which this series is a useful corrective to our misperceptions about Victoria. For one thing, she’s young when we meet her: Jenna Coleman is in fact 30 (and, with her Cara Delevingne eyebrows much prettier than the original), but she is convincing as the young queen at 18, which is when she succeeded to the throne. She looks insecure and vulnerable at her coronation: as she was. There’s also a palpable sense of her humour here in her relationship with Lord Melbourne — she was a woman who could be very much amused.

Our image of Victoria is of a rather terrifying old lady, which is how she ended up at the end of her long life, but we forget that at the start of her reign she was utterly unprepared for her role. She seems taken aback when she gives orders to her elders, and they obey her. She still plays with her doll.

Before she succeeded to the throne she shared a room with her mother. And she was, in fact, culpably unworldly about politics and the court. That ignorance can be attributed to the so-called Kensington system, under which she was educated, whereby her upbringing was dictated by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her Svengali-ish adviser, Sir John Conroy, who wished to establish a regency by which they would exercise control. Much of the human drama of the series concerns the way Victoria breaks free of them and establishes herself as her own woman, with the help of Melbourne.

Theirs was, quite genuinely, a close friendship; it’s fair to say he adored the young queen in a chaste way and she depended on him, at least until he left office and was displaced by Albert.

That brings us to another very useful aspect of the series: it reminds us how very German the royal family was back then — well, from the start of the eighteenth century until the First World War, when the family prudently changed its name to Windsor.

We see Victoria’s mother speaking to her in German, until Victoria crossly tells her to use English. Her family is German, with their roots back home in Hanover. Her governess, Louise Lehzen, is German; Albert, when he appears, speaks German with her. The servants observe dourly that “there are too many Germans round here”.