Parenting & Family Quote by Queen Victoria

Monarchy is supposed to sanctify birth; Victoria punctures that myth with a pin. Calling an ugly baby "a very nasty object" is deliberately shocking, less because it’s cruel than because it refuses the era’s sentimental script that infants are automatically cherubic, morally pure, and socially redeeming. The line turns a supposedly sacred subject into an aesthetic problem, as if a baby were a badly designed piece of furniture in a drawing room. That’s the point: even in a culture obsessed with lineage, heredity, and the mystique of bloodlines, the first human fact is physicality, and physicality can disappoint.

The second half is the sharper blade. "And the prettiest is frightful" yanks the reader away from simple snobbery toward something closer to maternal uncanny. A "pretty" baby isn’t comforting; it’s still alarming, an intrusive little stranger whose dependence and vulnerability carry the threat of death, illness, and responsibility. The prettiness doesn’t redeem the terror; it only frames it.

Context matters: Victoria was both a mother of nine and a sovereign who experienced childbirth not as a soft-focus domestic tableau but as repeated political and bodily upheaval. Infant mortality was a nearby shadow; doctors were limited; pregnancy was relentless. The remark reads like private candor breaking through public piety. It also reflects a classed, controlled world where feelings were managed and appearances policed - so the rare moment of unvarnished disgust becomes a kind of truth-telling. Victoria’s intent isn’t to demean babies so much as to reject the compulsory performance of adoration, admitting that creation can be grotesque before it becomes beloved.