Children's Book Penned by the Young Queen Victoria to be Published

A story written by the future Queen Victoria when she was 10 years old is to be published for the first time.

The Adventures of Alice Laselles by Alexandrina Victoria, Aged 10 and 3/4, tells the story of a girl who is sent away to Mrs Duncombe's School for Girls when her father remarries.

Far from the sober image that we are familiar with from her later years, Victoria shows a child's flair for the dramatic.

One passage reads: "'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 scratched-out title, replaced with Alice (Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)}

The story was originally called The School, until Victoria decided to name it after her leading character.

Alice's schoolmates include Barbara, the clever daughter of a wealthy banker, whose pride "spoiled her otherwise fine expression"; Ernestine Duval, a "poor little French orphan" who had suffered from "the small pox, by which malady she had lost one eye"; and Diana O’Reilly, who was raised by a nurse after the death of her mother, and dispatched to Mrs Duncombe's when her father returned from India after 10 years to find a "tall girl of a most uncouth appearance" who spoke in an "unintelligible" brogue.

^{Illustrations are based on Victoria's paper dolls (Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)}

 Why Queen Victoria was the Diana of her day

Alice is illustrated with a combination of digitally manipulated copies of paper dolls made by Victoria and her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, and etchings by Cristina Pieropan.

^{Queen Victoria's paper dolls (Royal Archives/Her Majesty Queen/PA Wire)}

It is a rare example of Victoria's early writing. A prolific diarist, she kept journals from the age of 13 which have been collected into 141 volumes totaling more than 43,000 pages.

^{Victoria's red composition notebook, kept at Windsor Castle (Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)}

 Lucy Worsley assesses the remark life of Queen Victoria's god-daughter, a royal suffragette

Victoria wrote Alice in a red notebook and dedicated it to her mother. The book is now in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

The dedication reads, "To my dear Mamma, this my first attempt at composition is affectionately and dutifully inscribed by her affectionate daughter, Victoria."

The author Jacqueline Wilson, who provides the book's introduction, said: If Victoria hadn’t been destined to be Queen, I think she might have made a remarkable novelist.

New Sherlock Holmes Short Story Found After 111 Years (Perhaps...)

Walter Elliot, an eighty year-old historian unearthed a forgotten Sherlock Holmes work after it had been in his attic in Selkirk, Scotland for almost fifty years.

Ceru Iajes/SWINS

Elliot told The Telegraph: 

Usually people would throw out these books or sell them off. It has been in my family for quite a while now. I have no idea if it has ever been published…I have no idea how many they made and sold.
  

AP Photo

The book is called "Sherlock Holmes:  Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar. It concerns Watson going on a trip to Selkirk ."I've always been interested in history and my family has always passed on stories and I suppose this was one of the stories that was passed down,” said Elliot. 

“I’ve had this book for about 40 or 50 years. I must have got it from a friend because I can’t remember buying it from anyone.”The story in in a 45 page pamphlet and was written in 1904 by Sir Conan Doyle to help raise money to rebuild a wooden bridge that had been flooded in town.I can’t remember how much they raised…they wanted it to be a carriage bridge, but they didn’t get quite enough for that,” Elliot said.  Instead, he added, they built an iron bridge “and it’s still there today."

Addendum:

Just after a new Dr. Seuss book was discovered, historian Walter Elliot claimed he owns a copy of a never-released Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, by deduction, the Brig Bazaar” is a 1,300-word short story that Doyle purportedly wrote more than 80 years ago. The booklet holding the story will be on display at the Cross Keys Selkirk Pop-up Community Museum in Selkirk, Scotland, starting Saturday. But while Sherlock fans might rush to see the piece, experts are skeptical that the recently discovered story was actually written by Doyle. (GalleyCat, L.A. Times)

Malorie Blackman the New Children's Laureate of the United Kingdom

Parents can be put off buying a book if it has a black character on the front cover, the new Children's Laureate of the United Kingdom has said.

Malorie Blackman, the 51-year-old author of dozens of books including the award-winning Noughts & Crosses series for teenagers, has said there was still a need for 'more ethnically diverse literature in this country'.

The author, from London, has said she will use her two-year tenure to 'bang the drum' for diversity.
She said there was a lack of black and Asian children in picture books and described feeling 'totally invisible' when she was younger due to never reading a book that featured a black child, The Telegraph has reported.

Children will go with any story as long as it's good but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover it is perhaps not for them.
'Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

She also told the paper she wanted to spend her time as laureate focusing on older children and teenagers.

The mother-of-one, who worked as a computer programmer before becoming a full-time writer 23 years ago, said she will use her position to be an 'advocate' for public libraries and campaign against 'short-sighted' closures.

She said she owed her success to her local libraries when she was growing up in Lewisham, south-east London.

I will do everything I can to ensure our library service is maintained or improved especially when you look at other countries like South Korea which in 2012 initiated a programme to actually build 180 libraries and Russia are building libraries and we seem to be closing them and I just think its a very short-sighted move.

The author, whose novel Pig-Heart Boy was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and made into a BBC series, said it was 'a real honour' to be chosen for the role and that children's books needed a champion.