In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria, sheltered, small in stature, and female, became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina, Drina to her family, had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment her uncle William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone.