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 INSCRIBED BY QUEEN VICTORIA
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[HELPS, ARTHUR, ed.] LEAVES FROM THE JOURNAL OF OUR LIFE IN THE HIGHLANDS, 1848 TO 1861. [London: Smith, Elder and Co., ca. 1865.] 8vo. Original dark green cloth, ruled in gilt. T.e.g. [vi], 145, [i] (Printer's colophon) pages. Eleven mounted albumen prints of Scottish views, four engraved plates, several other illustrations in the text. Light wear to one lower corner, some foxing of plates (not affecting images). A fine copy.
ONE OF 63[?] COPIES FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION PRIOR TO PUBLICATION, signed and inscribed by Queen Victoria "To Sir Charles Wood, Bart. . . . In recollection of former happy bye gone days," and dated October 4, 1865 at Balmoral, Scotland. Following her marriage in 1840 to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, Queen Victoria "came to adopt her husband's view, that peace and quiet were most readily to be secured at a distance from [London]" (DNB). In 1842, she made the first of many visits to Scotland:
After Prince Albert died in December, 1861, "the romance of the queen's life was changed into a tragedy" (Id.). Victoria's highland refuge came to have greater significance and "when she paid, in May 1862, the first painful visit of her widowhood to Balmoral, her reception was a real solace to her" (Id.). The Queen became determined to preserve the memory of her times with Albert at Balmoral:
Charles Lindley Wood, Second Viscount Halifax (1839-1934), was a contemporary and childhood companion of Victoria and Albert's son and heir Edward (1841-1910), Prince of Wales, who later took the throne as Edward VII. Shortly after his graduation from Oxford in 1862, Wood was "appointed a groom of the bedchamber in the household of the Prince of Wales, whom five years earlier he had accompanied on a journey in the Lake District and subsequently on a tour through Germany" (Id.). However, "[r]ejecting the political career which was open to him through his family connexions, in 1868 Wood accepted the presidency of the English Church Union" (Id.). By 1877, his growing involvement with ecclesiastical politics led him to resign his post in Edward's household - "an event to which many years later his change in the family motto from Perseverando to 'I like my choice' is an allusion" (Id.). This copy of Leaves From the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands bears not only a fitting inscription by Queen Victoria to Wood, given the "former happy bye gone days" he spent with the royal family, but Wood's bookplate with the original "Perseverando" motto.
"The texts [of Leaves From the Journal of Our Life] are selections from the journals of Queen Victoria, and the illustrations were chosen by the editor to record places as they looked in the mid-1860s" (The Truthful Lens). George Washington Wilson (1823-1893), "one of Scotland's most active photographers at this time" (Id.), was commissioned in 1853 by Victoria and Albert to "record the building progress at Balmoral. This began a long association between the royal family and Wilson, who undertook several commissions. Wilson's photographs were used to illustrate Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868)" (DNB). Because of this long association, and the attribution to Wilson of the photographs in the 1868 edition of Leaves From the Journal of Our Life, it is most likely that the photographs in the pre-publication issue were also by him.
Scarce; only a small number of copies of the privately distributed, pre-publication issue of Leaves From the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands have appeared at auction since 1975. Cf. The Truthful Lens 83 (1868 first published edition). BT000079.
Provenance: Inscription and bookplate of Charles Lindley Wood, Second Viscount Halifax.
$4350
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