1865 - Queen Victoria and the Highlands

The English obsession with the Highlands as a holiday location has its origin in the reign of Queen Victoria. In setting up Balmoral Castle as a holiday home, furnished with tartans, the Queen herself set a trend that others followed. We are fortunate that she documented her own love-affair with the Highlands in two books of which this was the earliest.

Queen Victoria's visits to the Highlands from 1842 onwards and her subsequent purchase of Balmoral did much to encourage the notion of Scotland as a romantic country to visit. Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868), drawing on her diary, is the Queen's own expression of what the Highlands meant to her. She followed this up, in 1884, with More Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands, which was compiled as a tribute to the late John Brown, her 'particular gillie'.

This copy of Leaves, inscribed to her Court Physician, is a private edition of 1865, pre-dating the first publicly distributed edition by some three years.

Queen Victoria. Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands. London, [1865] RB.s.857

Queen Victoria and the Highlands

130mm

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