Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was a gift to Queen Mary from the nation; a showcase for contemporary craft and design, it preserved for history the ideal home of the 1920s, at a scale of one foot to one inch. Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, conceived the idea, and through her influence many famous artists, designers, authors and craftsmen contributed to the project.

The Dolls' House Library contains, alongside standard works such as four tiny Bibles, miniature atlases and a complete works of Shakespeare, around 200 diminutive editions of contemporary British literature. Princess Marie Louise personally wrote to the most significant writers of the time to ask for either an original composition or a suitable passage from work already published, transcribed by hand or submitted for professional copying. The bindings are mostly morocco leather or vellum, some with beautifully precise gold-tooled decoration. The majority of the volumes were bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with the remaining bound by Birdsall & Son, Hatchards, A. Loosely, R. Riviere & Sons and Zaehnsdorf. Each book contains a tiny bookplate designed by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.

This tiny volume is part of a miniature printed edition of Shakespeare's works, dedicated to the actor Ellen Terry, edited by J. Talfourd Blair and published in 1904 by David Bryce and Son, Glasgow. Ellen Terry was one of the best-known actors of the Victorian and Edwardian Age, particularly well known for her professional partnership with Henry Irving (who also had an edition of Shakespeare named after him, RCIN 1056053-60).