Queen Victoria’s Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands: Illustrated Print Culture and the Politics of Representation

Queen Victoria’s Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands: Illustrated Print Culture and the Politics of Representation

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Queen Victoria published her first Highland memoir in 1867, a sentimental narrative of royal life dedicated to Prince Albert entitled Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.In response to the popularity of this edition, the publisher Smith, Elder and Co.released a lavishly illustrated edition in late 1868 to capitalize on the Christmas gift book market.

It featured seventy-nine illustrations after works by various artists and photographers.When scholars have turned their attention to the Queen’s journal, they have produced rich and sophisticated discussions of gender, monarchy, and celebrity, especially as they relate to royal domesticity in the Scottish Highlands.Yet these readings have rarely extended to the illustrated version of the text.

This article will consider the conjunction of monarchy, the Scottish Highlands, and illustrated print culture in the illustrated Leaves through two different My Mom Dad Is Well Trained Funny Cartoon Dog Gift For Dog Lover Personalized Shirt types of images: steel-plate engravings after watercolours by the artist Carl Haag and wood engravings after watercolour sketches of Highland games by the Swedish artist Egron Lundgren.Each positions the male Highlander as a central figure in constructing the dynamic of royal family life, sovereignty, and empire.Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have recently explored what it meant for the British to be ‘at home with the Empire’, asking ‘was it possible to be “at home” with an empire and with the effects of imperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such an entanglement?’.

In the course of this article, I argue that these illustrations constructed the male Highlander as a site of familiarity within the bounds of the nation, while simultaneously signalling his otherness and proximity to the more far-flung reaches of empire.As a result, Leaves is as much about empire as it is about domesticity, even as it eschews direct references to current events of the period wella color charm 050 cooling violet that directly threatened both. .