Story written by future Queen Victoria aged 10 to be published for first time

Author Jacqueline Wilson says monarch could have been remarkable novelist in introduction to tale of Alice, 12, who is sent to boarding school



Always a diligent diary writer, Queen Victoria’s journals run to 141 volumes comprising 43,000 pages, from which extracts were published in what became a bestseller.

But one of her earliest works, written when she was 10, is only now set to be published for the first time, giving a fascinating insight into the vivid imagination of the future monarch.

Entitled “The Adventures of Alice Laselles by Alexandrina Victoria Aged 10 and ¾”, and written in an unassuming red composition notebook now in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, it tells the story of a 12-year-old girl sent away to boarding school after her father remarries.

In keeping with the tone of children’s literature at the time, it shows her love for the dramatic. In one passage, when Alice hears that she is to be sent to Mrs Duncombe’s school for girls, the privately-tutored Victoria writes: “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.”

She provides a rich cast of characters: Barbara, the clever daughter of a rich London banker, whose unconquerable pride “spoiled her otherwise fine expression”; Ernestine Duval, “a poor little French orphan” who had suffered from smallpox “by which malady she had lost one eye”; and Diana O’Reilly, left with a nurse for 10 years when her mother died and whose father returned from India to find a “tall girl of a most uncouth appearance”, who spoke in an “unintelligible” brogue and was dispatched to Mrs Duncombe’s school immediately.

The story climaxes with Alice being wrongly accused of allowing a cat into the school without permission, but in the best tradition of happy endings, the true culprit is eventually revealed and Alice goes on to become “one of the best learners”.

The book is to be published by the

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in June, with illustrations produced by combining Felix Petruška’s digitally manipulated copies of paper dolls made by Victoria and her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, with etchings by Cristina Pieropan.

In the book’s introduction, the children’s author

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writes: “If Victoria hadn’t been destined to be the Queen, I think she might have made a remarkable novelist.”

Jacky Colliss Harvey, a publisher at the Royal Collection Trust, said: “Queen Victoria is well known for the journals she wrote as an adult, but this composition, which she produced as a child, has never been published before.”