Parenting & Family Quote by Queen Victoria

Victorian sentimentality loved to paint motherhood in halos; Victoria punctures it with a pin. The line is disarming because it’s both a confession and a hedge: “I don’t dislike babies” is the dutiful preface, the acceptable posture for a queen whose body and lineage were state assets. Then comes the blunt pivot - “rather disgusting” - a word with physical teeth. It drags infancy out of the nursery portrait and back into the realm of smells, fluids, and relentless need.

The intent isn’t cruelty so much as control. Victoria is asserting a private sensibility against a public role that demanded she perform maternal devotion at scale. She had nine children; pregnancy and childbirth were not abstract virtues but recurring, compulsory events. Read in that light, the remark is less an eccentric dislike than a small act of resistance: the monarch insisting on her right to revulsion, even while doing what dynasty required.

The subtext also cuts at the era’s moral theater. “Very young ones” draws a boundary that preserves affection for children as people while rejecting the ideology of the infant as sacred object. It’s a proto-modern take, closer to honest parenting than to the period’s saccharine iconography: babies are loved, and they are gross, and those truths can coexist.

Context sharpens the edge. Victoria’s reign helped define the domestic ideal, yet her private writings often betray irritation with the domestic labor behind it. This sentence works because it exposes the gap between national mythmaking and bodily reality, in the queen’s own unvarnished voice.