Historian Lucy Worsley recreates the wedding of the 19th Century
Historian Lucy Worsley recreates the wedding of the 19th Century
This year has seen two royal weddings take place – and now historian Lucy Worsley is bringing us a third!
In this documentary she re-stages the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, re-creating everything from the 200-strong guest list to the 300lb tiered cake and the white dress that went on to be a must-have for all brides, even today.
To make life even harder for the team, they had to re-create each item in exactly the same way it would have been made in 1840, referring to newspapers and Queen Victoria’s diaries for details.
A fascinating look at the wedding that formed the template for all those to come.
TV Times rating: ****
Here, in an exclusive interview with TV Times, Lucy, who turns 45 on 18 December, tells us more about this epic challenge…
Why did you want to recreate Queen Victoria’s wedding?
We wanted to recreate a special day in royal history and next year is Victoria’s bicentenary. It makes you answer all sorts of questions that never normally come up, like how exactly the wedding cake was made. It’s a little snapshot of so many things – the dress, the individual characters who were involved, the changing nature of the monarchy – and, in a year when we’ve had two royal weddings, it’s very interesting to see where the royal wedding first began back in 1840.
It sounds like a huge project…
It was. The biggest challenge was trying to find people who could provide the right stuff. There was a special cake tin that had to be made; we had to find all the game on the menu – some of which it is illegal to eat now. And then there were the costumes…
How hard was it to have everything as it was in 1840?
It wasn’t possible to do absolutely everything. We’ve lost the skills and we didn’t have the ready access to cheap labour that people had in the 19th century. On their cake, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had this amazing sugar sculpture but it would have been impossible to make that in the modern age. We had to use a 3D printer.
