Princess Victoria, known as Vicky, was the eldest of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's nine children. She was her father's favourite child, and Albert supervised her education closely. Vicky developed lifelong interests in culture and history, with particular enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Handel, and Charles I. She was also a keen amateur artist, working in pencil and watercolour during her childhood and later in oils and plaster.

Vicky became engaged at fourteen to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (known as Fritz) and married him shortly after her seventeenth birthday, in January 1858. The couple moved to Berlin, where Vicky struggled to adapt to a more formal court environment. Her first child, Wilhelm (later Kaiser Wilhelm II), was born in January 1859 after a very difficult birth which left him with a lifelong injury to his arm. She would have seven more children, five of whom survived to adulthood.

Albert had hoped that Vicky's liberal education and her marriage into the Prussian royal family would be instrumental in liberalising Germany. Both Vicky and Fritz had liberal constitutional politics, which brought them into conflict with Fritz's father and with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as well as several of their own children. Wilhelm in particular opposed his parents' politics and became increasingly alienated from his mother.

Fritz became Emperor of Germany in 1888, when he was already suffering from throat cancer. He died three months later, and was succeeded by Wilhelm, who immediately reversed some of his father's key policies and ordered surveillance on his mother. Vicky surreptitiously arranged for her correspondence to be returned to England. She died six months after Queen Victoria, in August 1901.