Buy the ultimate princess fairytale: A book by Queen Victoria, aged ten
ONCE upon a time, a princess wrote a story about a girl’s adventures at boarding school – a colourful composition that was soon filed away with the rest of her school work and forgotten.
But now, 185 years later, the imaginative tale by the future Queen Victoria is to be published for the first time.
The short piece tells the story of a 12-year- old girl, Alice Laselles, who was sent to boarding school after her mother died and her father remarried.
Alice befriends a host of characters, including a ‘poor little French orphan’ who has been half-blinded by smallpox and is falsely accused of smuggling a cat into the school but clears her name and triumphs as ‘one of the best learners in the school’.
It was written in Victoria’s red composition notebook for her studies with her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, and kept in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.
In the introduction, children’s author Jacqueline Wilson says: ‘If Victoria hadn’t been destined to be Queen, I think she might have made a remarkable novelist.’
Victoria, who became Queen at 18 in 1837, wrote the inscription: ‘To my dear Mamma, this my first attempt at composition is affectionately and dutifully inscribed by her affectionate daughter, Victoria.’
In one passage, Alice is told she is to be sent to Mrs Duncombe’s boarding school. Victoria wrote: ‘“Oh do not send me away dear Pappa”, exclaimed Alice Laselles, as she threw her arms around her Pappa’s neck; “don’t send me away, O let me stay with you.” And she sobbed bitterly.’ The tale will be published in June as The Adventures Of Alice Laselles By Alexandrina Victoria, Aged 10 And ¾. Alexandrina was the young princess’s first name but she became known as Victoria, her second name, when she was still a child.
The book is illustrated with images of paper dolls made by Victoria with her governess at Kensington Palace, superimposed on newly-created backgrounds.