This nine-volume selection from the letters of Queen Victoria, with ancillary material, was commissioned by her son, Edward VII, and published between 1907 and 1932, with a gap of almost twenty years between the third and fourth volumes. The editors of the first three volumes, the poet and writer A. C. Benson (1862-1925) and the second Viscount Esher (1852-1930), administrator and courtier, decided that the plan for the selection of letters from the thousands available (bound in volumes, with many of the early ones indexed by the Prince Consort) should be to publish ‘such documents as would serve to bring out the development of the Queen’s character and disposition, and to give typical instances of her methods in dealing with political and social matters’. The volumes are arranged chronologically from Victoria’s first known letter, written when she was nine, to her last journal entry, nine days before her death in 1901.