Publisher's Synopsis
It was the journals of Grandfather Daniel Gurney's sisters, one of them Elizabeth Fry, which first fired fifteen-year-old Laura Troubridge to keep her own journals from 1873. The father of the six Troubridge children was Colonel Sir Thomas St Vincent Troubridge, a hero of the Crimean War who became an ADC to Queen Victoria and who died a few weeks after his young wife in 1867. The six orphans then went to live at Runcton in Norfolk with their grandfather. He was very old-fashioned and had changed nothing since the death of his wife, Lady Harriet Gurney, in the 1830s. In Laura Troubridge's journals and memoirs we have an inimitable, authentic eye-witness account of family life in Victorian England with vivid portraits of all their relations, governesses and tutors. She describes picnics and excursions, staying in country houses, visits to London and finally her engagement. Already she was designing decorative tiles, Christmas cards and illustrating children's books. Later, as Laura Hope, she became well-known as a pastelist and painted Queen Victoria's grandchildren at Osborne. The journals and memoirs are edited by her daughter, Jaqueline Hope-Nicholson and illustrated by the author's own drawings and by family photographs.
