The author, later identified as Edmund Gosse, author of Father and Son and later Librarian of the House of Lords, spoke also of "a semi-religious admiration", stressing that "the character of Her Majesty was very widely divined; it cannot with truth be said to have been very precisely known". Even now it is not easy to separate out the character of the Queen from her images. An understanding of both is crucial to an understanding of the changing role of monarchy which was to change even more during the last decades of the twentieth century as the demand for a "modern monarchy" grew louder.

There were moments even in Victoria's own long reign when it did not seem that the monarchy would last. The Queen herself, according to her daughter, princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, believed in 1872 that while the monarchy would survive her own lifetime, there would be an "approaching calamity": "it is no use thinking what will come after if the principal person himself [the Prince of Wales, her eldest son and her eventual successor, Edward VII] does not". A popular book which appeared at the time of the first Jubilee, the Golden Jubilee of 1887, The Queen's Resolve, began with the confident words "The Queen and her subjects are of one heart and mind... The celebration of Jubilee Year is therefore truly a personal as well as a national event. Deep interest is stirred in all hearts by the recollection of the vast series of changes, religious, intellectual, moral, political, and material, in the affairs of the empire during the last fifty years; but the national mind is mainly engaged and interested in the story of the Queen's own life". The radical politician Joseph Chamberlain, then reforming Mayor of industrial Birmingham, had written a year earlier that "the Republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving it will come in our generation". It did not. Victoria, widow in black, was then secluded from her subjects and republicans seemed to be gaining in strength, but by the end of the reign, after two Jubilees, monarchy was stronger than ever before.