15 Pieces of History That Victoria Did Differently

Eve Myles as Mrs Jenkins (Photo: (C) ITV Plc)

There Would Have Been a LOT More Servants

Besides dramatic stories of royal romances and government intrigue, Victoria also features a lot of plots about the servants in Buckingham Palace. This is probably Downton Abbey’s fault, as the upstairs/downstairs plot split was extremely popular. The problem with Victoria is that the show doesn’t exactly have a Carson or an Anna. And the servant characters’ stories are often much less interesting than their royal counterparts.

But the other part that’s kind of bizarre? The real Buckingham Palace would have had a ton more servants than this. In order to keep the stories smaller, and focused on a handful of significant characters, we never met any of the other servants who keep the palace running. There would have been a large staff present, and there would have been a strict hierarchical structure in place. They all wouldn’t have been hanging out in the kitchen together. Let alone all chatting and being friends together the way that they seem to do every week.

Clearly, this technique is meant to help audiences familiarize themselves with the servant characters, most of whom aren’t recognizable historical figures. But it also has the strange effect of making the kitchens at Buckingham Palace seem almost smaller than those at a house like Downton. And, quite frankly, it’s just weird. As viewers, we all probably know that more than eight people work behind-the-scenes of a royal household. But the series’ insistence on pretending otherwise is baffling. These stories – the battle over tallow candles, for example – don’t seem to be based on anything from real life. (Or even necessarily structured in a way that would have happened in real life.) And they generally seem created solely to give the “downstairs” characters something to do, rather than in the interest of historical accuracy. In short: The real lives of Buckingham Palace’s servants would have looked a lot different from this.