Never Alone: The Teenage Years of Queen Victoria Sarah Michaels

Victoria could not go down a flight of stairs without holding an adult's hand. She could not accept a cup of tea from anyone outside her household. She could not read a book nobody had approved, keep a friend nobody had chosen, or spend a single night of her life in a room by herself. She slept in her mother's bedroom for six thousand six hundred nights, and her mother read her diary every evening before bed.None of this was an accident. It was a plan, and the people who built it wrote down what it was for.They called it the System. It had three stated objectives: make the country hand her mother a regency, keep the girl so dependent that nobody could take her away, and make her so beloved before she ever reigned that she would inherit a popularity no monarch had matched. Two of those objectives worked. The third one had an expiry date printed in an Act of Parliament, and the whole scheme came down to whether a sick king could survive until one girl's eighteenth birthday.He made it by twenty-seven days.For readers thirteen and up.