Image: The Court Jeweller

Grab your copy of the latest pick from The Court Jeweller Book Club, magpies! It’s time for our discussion of Lucy Worsley’s Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life.

Engraving of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s wedding ceremony, 10 February 1840 (Cornelius Brown/Wikimedia Commons)

Worsley’s book frames the familiar story of Queen Victoria using a new technique: focusing on twenty-four significant days from her long and fascinating life. Worsley compares the structure of the book to “peering through twenty-four different windows into her life.”

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Service on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 22 June 1897 (London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company/Wikimedia Commons)

Worsley has selected both familiar milestones (Victoria’s birth, her wedding, the death of Prince Albert) and days that are important but less well known (the wedding of her parents, Florence Nightingale’s visit to Balmoral, the Prince of Wales’s illness at Sandringham). For me, this was a really effective way to focus the narrative of the book, giving me the chance to nod knowingly about certain days and read with fascination about moments I didn’t know quite as well.

Image: The Court Jeweller

So what are your thoughts on Worsley’s biography of Victoria? I’m very excited to hear about your experiences reading the book. (Remember that you might want to leave separate comments on separate topics, as our spam filter gets cranky about super-long comments!)