Tonight on our Doctor Who episode, one of the characters was Queen Victoria.
I thought it was fun seeing the woman from whom we get the name for an Australian state, a building in Sydney, and a market in Melbourne.
And there's probably other things I'm forgetting.
Yeah...The Queen Victoria we saw was really just an actress. But I enjoyed the experience anyway.
I'm trying to figure out when Victoria the state was named. Lord Wiki says that in 1851, it officially became a colony. So maybe then? Although what if it were an unofficial colony for awhile?
Queen Victoria was born in 1819, so if 1851 was when the state was born, then she was 32 when it was named for her. In our Doctor Who episode, she was 60. And she was bit by a werewolf...maybe.
Lord Wiki has a lot of places named after Queen Victoria. Queensland is named for her, but I think that's a bit general. It's like saying you're going to name something after Obama and calling it Presidentland.
I thought it was fun seeing the woman from whom we get the name for an Australian state, a building in Sydney, and a market in Melbourne.
And there's probably other things I'm forgetting.
Yeah...The Queen Victoria we saw was really just an actress. But I enjoyed the experience anyway.
I'm trying to figure out when Victoria the state was named. Lord Wiki says that in 1851, it officially became a colony. So maybe then? Although what if it were an unofficial colony for awhile?
Queen Victoria was born in 1819, so if 1851 was when the state was born, then she was 32 when it was named for her. In our Doctor Who episode, she was 60. And she was bit by a werewolf...maybe.
Lord Wiki has a lot of places named after Queen Victoria. Queensland is named for her, but I think that's a bit general. It's like saying you're going to name something after Obama and calling it Presidentland.
Innumerable Victoria Streets, a Parade, QV shopping centre on the site of the old Queen Victoria hospital. A football ground, Victoria Park. Lake Victoria. Sydney has a Victoria Road. The list is long.
ReplyDeleteAndrew,
ReplyDeleteYeah. I saw a long list, but was too lazy to list everything.
Thanks for doing some of it for me!
P.S-I don't think I saw the lake on the list...or the park.
I have been researching my family tree on Ancestry.com lately and have discovered on my father's side there were a lot of my ancestors living in London in the 19th century during Queen Victoria's reign.
ReplyDeleteSo I decided to research 19th century London and Britian to get an understanding of what it was like when my ancestors lived there.
What I discovered was that London and the British empire saw monumental growth an prosperity during her reign. London's population increased from 1.5 million people to over 6 million.
This may explain why so many places in the world were named in her honour as the british empire saw rapid expansion.
BTW there is also a small city in south Texas called Victoria. It's near my partner's mother's ranch in Goliad texas.
ReplyDeleteJason,
ReplyDeleteI think it's really neat that you researched your ancestors and the time period in which they lived.
And yeah...the growth of the British empire might explain why Queen Victoria was honored so many times. At first I was thinking it was because she was well-liked, and that might be true. But I guess it could have been about expanding, settling, and acquiring new places. They would need a name, and why not honor the current queen.
I wonder if most Victoria places were named while she was the Queen. Were any named after she left the throne?
Do you know if the city in Texas is named after the Queen? It could be. Or it could be named after a place that's named after the queen. Like if I suddenly owned an island, I might name it Victoria in honor of the state in Australia. I wouldn't be naming it after the queen.
Anyway, I'm going to look up these Texas places on Google Maps.
I just looked up Victoria Texas. It's not named after the queen, but a Mexican president named Guadalupe Victoria. Though that was not his birth name. I'm not sure why it was changed. I think maybe it was a religious thing?
ReplyDeleteDid a little more research. There was a saint Victoria. But the name wasn't very popular until Queen Victoria came along.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that about Victoria, Texas. I was always perplexed as to why they used the name Victoria and wondered if it was because of Queen Victoria. Given that Texas was part of Mexico for a period, naming it after a president of Mexico makes sense.
ReplyDeleteMost of the names named in honour of Queen Victoria in Melbourne would have been named during her reign. Especially those named in the 19th century when we were the British colony of Victoria.
After federation in 1901, anything named Victoria would have been in honour of the state of Victoria rather than Queen Victoria.