The interest in royal biography both in academic and more popular history shows no sign of abating with a continuing flow of films, exhibitions, and television productions. The Young Victoria is yet another addition to the genre. Produced to accompany the 2019 Kensington Palace exhibition that marked the 200th anniversary of Victoria's birth, it was the final work of senior curator Deirdre Murphy, who, unfortunately, died from breast cancer before the book's completion.

The distinctive feature of the book lies in its close relationship to the resources that were displayed in the exhibition. Drawing upon Murphy's deep knowledge of the places in which Victoria's childhood took place and the documents and objects that have survived from that time, it has as its core purpose a contestation of the later representations of Victoria's childhood as unrelentingly unhappy. Richly illustrated, it takes the reader on a journey that is as much informed by the visual artifacts as it is by the text. Alongside the more well-known portraits and photographs are illustrations of the royal residences, reproductions of contemporary cartoons, and photographs of the princess's surviving jewelry, clothing, and other personal effects. There are also many sketches and paintings produced by Victoria herself, illustrating her pets, her dolls, other family members, and scenes and costumes from her regular visits to the theater.

Despite its title, the book moves beyond an account of Victoria's early years to critically examine how her childhood has been remembered. Rather than producing a conventional biography, Murphy focuses on the ways in which the queen reflected on her childhood in later life. At times, she reproduced depictions of herself as a lonely and isolated fatherless child cut off from the normal interactions of childhood and employed such depictions to explain some of the difficulties she was facing. On other occasions, she contested such claims, annotating publications that she thought misrepresented her situation. Many of these annotated accounts are reproduced here, with comments in the text providing essential context. Although Victoria's antagonism toward her mother's advisor, Sir John Conroy, was clearly apparent in her later accounts, she was also quick to intervene when she felt that the reputations of others in her life were being tarnished.

Murphy's research would suggest that overall the queen tended to overemphasize the unhappiness of her early years. Looking back through the sadness brought on by the loss of her husband, her mother, and her half-sister later in her life, Victoria recalled little joy in her early years, yet the materials produced at the time counter such uniform negativity. Despite the constraints imposed by her position, the young princess was able to engage in many childish pursuits, creating a world of animals and dolls to compensate for the absence of friends of her own age, taking regular holidays to the seaside, and enjoying frequent visits to the theater. Nor was she entirely deprived of love and affection, with her mother and her relatives compensating in part for the lack of interest shown by her father's family. Although her preparation to assume the crown was limited by tensions within the wider family, her right to the position was consistently asserted by her mother and the hated Conroy, whose plans to expose her to the public through a series of carefully orchestrated dinners and tours, as well as strategically distributed photographs and portraits, did much to solidify her position as heir.

Much more than an exhibition catalogue, The Young Victoria engages with ongoing debates around monarchy and memory and the historiography surrounding the Victorian era. Although the book has a conventional chronological structure, it extends beyond Victoria's immediate childhood, looking back to remind the reader of the misadventures among the Hanoverians that left the young fatherless child as the heir to the throne as her uncles aged and died without any surviving children and moving beyond her accession to explore the legacy of her upbringing on her ability to fulfil the role. The decision to end the narrative with her marriage to Albert is a controversial one, implying perhaps that it was at this point that her childhood ended, an impression that is reinforced in the afterword, which deals with his premature death and the impact that it had on her effectiveness throughout the remainder of her reign. Historians may well want to debate this interpretation, but they will find in The Young Victoria a rich resource for the study of both Victoria's early years and her later reflections on their impact on her later life, long after the exhibition on which it was based has passed into history.