The Considerate Queen
When the young Aga Khan visited London in 1898 he was presented to Queen Victoria, and found her cultural sensitivity deeply touching.
1898
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
When the young Aga Khan visited London in 1898 he was presented to Queen Victoria, and found her cultural sensitivity deeply touching.
1898
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
In February 1898 the Aga Khan, then twenty, left Bombay for Europe. After some days enjoying life on the French Riviera he travelled on to Paris and London, and there in the glorious and bewitching Imperial capital he was presented at Windsor Castle to Queen Victoria herself. It was an intimate affair: only himself, his friend the Duke of Connaught and the Empress, now approaching her eightieth birthday.
SHE received me with the utmost courtesy and affability. The Queen, enfolded in voluminous black wraps and shawls, was seated on a big sofa. Was she tall or short, was she stout or not? I could not tell; her posture and her wraps made assessments of that kind quite impossible. I kissed the hand which she held out to me.
She had an odd accent, a mixture of Scotch and German — the German factor in which was perfectly explicable by the fact that she was brought up in the company of her mother, a German princess, and a German governess, Baroness Lehzen. She also had the German conversational trick of interjecting “so” — pronounced “tzo” — frequently into her remarks.
I was knighted by the Queen at this meeting but she observed that, since I was a prince myself and the descendant of many kings, she would not ask me to kneel, or to receive the accolade and the touch of the sword upon my shoulder, but she would simply hand the order to me. I was greatly touched by her consideration and courtesy.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.