Queen Victoria's diary goes online

Queen Victoria's diary made available online Credit: ITV News

The Queen has attended the launch of the Queen Victoria Journals Online Project at Buckingham Palace today.

On her instructions, hundreds of Victoria's original diaries were transcribed in longhand by her youngest daughter Princess Beatrice, a job that took her 39 years and was finished in 1940.

Launched on the anniversary of Queen Victoria's birthday by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the new website is part of a digitisation programme to make historic documents from the Royal Archives widely available for the first time.

ITV News' Royal Correspondent Tim Ewart reports.

The Director of Records at the Royal Household David Ryans told ITV News that "never before have all of the pages been made available for everyone to use".

Queen Victoria's youngest daughter Princess Beatrice was told to remove "offensive" passages from the archives. It took her 39 years to fill 111 volumes, totalling 43,000 pages of Queen Victoria's memories.