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

Abstract

QueenVictoria published her first Highland memoir in 1867, a sentimental narrativeof royal life dedicated to Prince Albert entitled Leaves from the Journal ofOur Life in the Highlands.  Inresponse to the popularity of this edition, the publisher Smith, Elder and Co.released a lavishly illustrated edition in late 1868 to capitalize on theChristmas gift book market.  It featuredseventy-nine illustrations after works by various artists andphotographers.  When scholars have turnedtheir attention to the Queen’s journal, they have produced rich andsophisticated discussions of gender, monarchy, and celebrity, especially asthey relate to royal domesticity in the Scottish Highlands.  Yet these readings have rarely extended tothe illustrated version of the text. This article will consider the conjunctionof monarchy, the Scottish Highlands, and illustrated print culture in theillustrated Leaves through two different types of images:  steel plate engravings after watercolors bythe artist Carl Haag and wood engravings after watercolor sketches of Highlandgames by the Swedish artist Egron Lundgren. Each positions the male Highlander as a central figure in constructingthe dynamic of royal family life, sovereignty and empire.  Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have recentlyexplored 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 ofimperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such anentanglement?” In the course of this article I will argue that theseillustrations constructed the male Highlander as a site of familiarity withinthe bounds of the nation, while simultaneously signaling his otherness andproximity to the more far-flung reaches of empire.   As a result, Leavesis as much about empire as it is aboutdomesticity, even as it eschews direct references to current events of theperiod that directly threatened both.