George Gardiner Alexander (1821–1897) can only be called the very model of a modern Major-General. He began life in the Marine Artillery—a branch of the armed forces in which promotion had always been merit-based—and saw service on various continents, retiring in 1867 with the rank of Major-General.

Along the way he became fluent in Chinese; today he is best known for his work on Confucius. He also wrote a play, Dimetri, set in 17th-century Russia. Doctor Victoria, published when he was sixty years old, is his only novel. That’s a shame. He’s got a lively and entertaining prose style; I’d have liked to see more of it.

About the Text

Doctor Victoria had no illustrations whatsoever. But if you are reading this on anything larger than a smartphone, the decorations along each side of the page are the endpapers of the printed book. The design is almost pretty enough to make up for the lack of illustrations.

One minor character in the book is unfortunately named Fitz-Jones. Unfortunately for the author, that is, because by Volume II he has entirely lost his grip on the name. For the remainder of the book, Mr. Fitz will be variously known as “Fitz-Jones”, “FitzJones” (no hyphen), “Fitz Jones” (two words), and “Fitzjones” (lower-case “j”).

The author seems to like using commas for emphasis instead of the customary italics: “But you, may dream as much as you like” or “what should we, do” where another would say “But you may dream” or “what should we do”.

Formalities

This etext is based on the 1881 Samuel Tinsley (London) edition: Volume I, Volume II, Volume III.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each chapter. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space.