Journal-istic Propaganda and the Monarchy:

Queen Victoria’s Leaves from a Highland Journal

Carla E. Coleman

Queen Victoria published the first volume of Leaves from a Highland Journal (1868) during a time when many English were questioning both her ability to rule and also the general relevancy of the monarchy in their own “modern” age. I argue that, given this tenuous political environment, Victoria published these “private” writings about her life in Scotland as the means to an overtly public end: the reaffirmation of the central importance of her monarchy to British society. While historically the English may have viewed Scotland as threateningly different, by the late eighteenth century, they had begun to romanticize that difference. Victoria’s portrayal of the Highlands taps into this view of England’s northern neighbor as charmingly archaic, "authentic" and, to oversimplify the relationship, representative of a bygone English era. Specifically, within Leaves, Victoria appears as a beloved rather than embattled monarch with a multitude of loyal Highland subjects who honor their Queen as the English would have “in olden feudal times.” She reinforces this romanticized ideal by including layers of "historical recollections," both actual (relating to the English monarchical presence in Renaissance Scotland), and fictional (primarily in reference to the works of Sir Walter Scott). Through this dramatization of her idealized relationship with Scotland, Victoria is able to illustrate the central role of the monarchy in a shared Anglo-Scottish past and present. She is also able to provide her English readers in particular with a model of the proper power relationship between Queen and subjects that they would do well to emulate.