A miniature copy of the poem Vespers, handwritten by A.A. Milne for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House.


Between 1921 and 1924, many of Britain and Ireland's most significant writers contributed handwritten books to the miniature library of Queen Mary's Dolls' House, a model royal home designed to show off the best of art, craft and manufacturing. The collection of tiny manuscripts for the doll library was organised by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who worked alongside the writer E.V. Lucas.

A.A. Milne is best known today for writing the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh, one of the most beloved of fictional bears, but these were not yet composed when in 1922 he sent a miniature book to the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. A good friend of E.V. Lucas, and a fellow writer for Punch, Milne was a successful playwright at the time and wrote for adults, not children. However, in the poem he contributed to the Dolls’ House can be found the beginnings of his Hundred Acre Wood world.

Vespers is the first publication in which readers meet Christopher Robin, the fictionalised version of Milne’s son who owned Pooh Bear and friends. In the poem, Christopher Robin kneels beside his bed to say his prayers, his mind wandering as he tries to remember who to pray for. It is a charming and well-loved poem, which was printed in the magazine Vanity Fair in 1923, and then a year later in Milne’s collection of poetry for children, When We Were Very Young. In his autobiography, Milne recalled that he wrote Vespers early in 1923, but he must have misremembered and in fact written it several months before, as documents in the Royal Archives reveal that he sent his miniature manuscript of Vespers to Princess Marie Louise in October 1922. The library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is therefore the earliest public recipient of the poem.

Milne had fun with the layout of the lines of his poem in the small pages of his Dolls’ House book. Christopher Robin’s dressing-gown digression, ‘And pull the hood right over my head’ is, for example, written in the shape of a hood; another page has only ‘…’ written on it, as the little boy gathers his thoughts. In other places, words and phrases are underlined, showing where Milne intended emphasis to be.

This important early iteration of Vespers was bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in vellum, simply decorated with a single-line gold-tooled border.