PARAGRAPH FOR PRECIS

The death of the Prince Consort was the central turning point in the history of Queen Victoria. She herself felt that her true life had ceased with her husband’s and that the remainder of her days upon earth were of a twilight nature—an epilogue to a drama that was done. Nor is it possible that her biographer should escape a similar impression. For him to there is darkness over the latter half of that long career. The first forty-two years of the Queen’s life are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert’s death, a veil descends. Only occasionally, at fitful and disconnected intervals, does it lift for a moment or two, a few main outlines; a few remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all conjecture and ambiguity. Thus, though the Queen survived her great bereavement for almost as many years as she had lived before it, the chronicle of those years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier life. We must be content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.

The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming personal concern to Victoria, it was an event of national and even European importance. He was only forty-two, and in the course of nature, he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Already at the time of his death, he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner circle of politicians, he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of the mechanism of the state.

-Lytton Strachey-Queen Victoria’.

(272 words)

SOLVED PRECIS 

Title:- Prince Consort’s Premature Death

The death of the Prince Consort when he was only forty-two profoundly affected Queen Victoria’s life, which from that day, became sad, lonely, and less public. It has also affected her biography for, after this sad event, fewer reliable records of her life are available; and the story of the latter half of her long career must, therefore, be brief. And since the Prince had played a useful part in the public life and the State of England, his death was regarded as an event of national and European importance.

(90 words)