At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England

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Description

A Newbery Honor writer traces the biography of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the African princess saved from execution and taken to England where Queen Victoria oversaw her upbringing and where she lived for a time before marrying an African missionary.
Once there was once a little girl–an orphaned African princess–who narrowly escaped death by human sacrifice in a West African village in 1850. A British sea captain named Frederick E. Forbes saved her life by talking King Gezo of Dahomey into giving the girl to Queen Victoria of England as a gift: “She would be a present from the King of the blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” As inconceivable as this tale sounds, this can be a true one. Award-winning writer Walter Dean Myers–piecing together her story from letters he found in a rare book and ephemera shop in London–paints a hauntingly detached portrait of the small African princess whom the heroic captain named Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

We follow her charmed but unlucky life as the Queen’s protégée through a succession of British middle-class households, beginning with the Forbes home. On account of her celebrated association and frequent visits with the Queen, Sarah grows up in an strange position of privilege, education, and celebrity. On the flip side, she is keenly aware that her decisions aren’t her own, and as a rescued orphan under the Queen’s protection, her life’s path is dictated by those acting in what they perceive to be her best interests. It is hard not to feel that it was once cruel of her protectors to wrench her (more than once in her life) from the adopted circle of relatives she adores, and eventually to encourage her to marry a West African businessman whom she clearly stated she could never love, and who would take her away from her adopted country. As the epilogue states, “She was once both unfortunate in her losses, and fortunate that those losses were not greater…. She perceived to find a measure of comfort wherever she was once, but was once destined to be excluding the world in which she lived.” This story, rich with historic prints, photographs, newspaper clippings, excerpts from Queen Victoria’s diary, and Sarah’s letters, is both fascinating and tragic. We have Myers to thank for rescuing this fine woman again–this time from the forgotten shelf of a London bookstore. (Ages 11 and older)

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