Queen Victoria is known for many things. During her 63-year reign, the queen led Great Britain to significant shifts in industrial, cultural and scientific aspects of the country.The period has been known as the Victorian era. However, what the public do not know about the queen, who was famous for her stern personality, is that she wrote a charming and adorable children's book. Huffington Post reports that the book was handwritten by then 10-year-old princess in a red notebook for a composition class held in Kensington Palace.
The book, titled "The Adventures of Alice Laselles," was discovered recently, and is going to be released soon. The story, which was originally titled "The School," follows Alice Laselles, a young girl sent to a boarding school by her father against her will. The boarding school, called Miss Duncombe's School for Girls, is not as pleasing as she expected after Alice is accused of breaking the school rules upon the discovery of a mystery cat in the school's cottage.
According to The Telegraph, aside from Alice, the story's characters mostly include her classmates in the boarding school such as Barbara, the smart and spoiled daughter of a wealthy British banker; "a poor little French orphan," named Ernestine Duval; and a one-eyed girl Diana O'Reilly who lost her eye to small pox.
The soon-to-be released storybook features the paper dolls that the young princess made with her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, which have been digitally manipulated to include the sketches made by artist Cristina Pieropan. Princess Victoria dedicated the story to her mother, the German-born Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The dedication reads, "To my dear Mamma, this my first attempt at composition is affectionately and dutifully inscribed by her affectionate daughter, Victoria."
Children's book writer Jacqueline Wilson wrote the book's foreword. According to Wilson, the story provides a rare glimpse of the Queen's secluded childhood, who was believed to be raised under the strict guidance of her mother, and described her childhood as melancholy.
"If Victoria hadn't been destined to be Queen, I think she might have made a remarkable novelist," Wilson said in the book's introduction. Queen Victoria is also known to be a prolific diarist, with over 43,000 pages worth of 141 volumes of her diaries which she kept since the age of 13.
"It humanises a queen that we tend to think of as the stout lady, with the rather boot face, but here she was - just as sweet and charming as any child nowadays," said Wilson. (via ITV News)
The book is set to be released on June 22.