Massacre in Ecuador

The American missionary Jim Elliot, massacred along with four colleagues by members of a remote tribe in the Ecuadorian jumble, was born 90 years ago today. He was only 28, had recently married and had one daughter, yet his religious fervour lived on in his wife, who eventually befriended and went to live with the same indigenous tribe. Many years later, she published her husband’s diary, which contained entries right up until ten days before his death.

Elliot was born in Portland, Oregon, on 8 October 1927 to a Plymouth Brethren preacher and his wife. While at high school, he developed a skill at public speaking, alongside other interests, such as in the school newspaper, acting and wrestling. In 1945, he entered Wheaton College, Illinois, a Christian residential arts college, where he nurtured an ambition to become a missionary. He graduated in 1949 with a degree in Greek, and returned to Portland. The following year, he moved to Oklahoma to attend the Summer Institute of Linguistics where he learned how to study unwritten languages. There he met a former missionary to the Quechua people, who told him about a group of Ecuadorian indigenous people - the Huaorani - who were considered violent and dangerous to outsiders.

In early 1952, Elliot travelled with a missionary colleague, Peter Fleming, to Quito, with the aim of evangelising to the Quechua Indians. While at Wheaton, he had begun a friendship with a fellow student, Elisabeth Howard. She followed him out to Quito, where they married in 1953, and lived in Shandia, in the rainforest of eastern Ecuador. They had one daughter in 1955. While working with the Quechua, Elliot was also preparing to reach the Huaorani - a project he and four other missionaries called Operation Auca (Auca being another, somewhat pejorative, name for the indigenous tribe).

In the second half of 1955, the missionaries began making contact by dropping gifts from their plane. In early January 1956, they landed on a sandbar in the Curaray River and established a camp. A few days later, the five missionaries were speared to death. Elisabeth continued missionary work with the Quechua, and then, in fact, went to live among the Huaorani (with her three year old daughter). Later, she published two books about her husband, and returned to the US in 1968, where she went on to write many other Christian books. Further information on Jim Elliot can be found at Wikipedia and Inspirational Christians. A detailed account of Operation Auca can also be found at Wikipedia.

In 1978, Elisabeth - by then married for a third time - edited and published The Journals of Jim Elliot (published by Fleming H. Revell in the US). They have stayed in print ever since. According to the publisher: ‘Jim Elliot was an intelligent thinker and strong writer in these personal, yet universal, musings about faith, work, and love. The Journals of Jim Elliot is a wonderful account of the life of a man who yearns to know God's plan for his life, details his fascinating missions work, and loves Elisabeth first as a single man, then as a happily married one. The Journals of Jim Elliot will intrigue fans of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, readers interested in missions, and young people struggling to find God’s plan for their lives.’ The journals begin when Elliot is still at Wheaton College and continue until just a few days before his death. Here are several extracts (form the UK edition published by Pickering & Inglish), including Elliot’s very last entry (all brackets, square and round, are as found in the book).

6 July 1950
‘Spent the evening with Dave Cooper who described the Quichua uplands as the neediest, roughest place in Ecuador. He has worked with Tidmarsh on the Shandia station, is burdened for the yet unreached Ecuadorians, Aucas, Cofanes, Sionas. Gave us sketch map of the area describing need.’

7 August 1950
‘Received word today from brothers Gill and Doane [leading brethren of the Portland assembly] that I should feel the assembly is behind me 100 percent in my going to Ecuador. God has set His seal.’

7 May 1952
‘Near full moon found us above Arias’s [an Ecuadorian family with whom I lodged], under a sparse stand of eucalyptus, after heavy rain. Sky was broken with clouds, and flashed stars, but the horizon was sufficiently clear to see Cayambe, Antisana, and Cotopaxi by moonlight. No night like it so far here in Ecuador. Someone tried to scare us off with gunfire, not knowing what we were doing there - finally came out in a troop with rifles, led by a senora who queried angrily, “Que pasa?” [What's happening]. Explaining that we were “amadores, no mas,” [only lovers] we obtained our “desculpe” [pardon]. Laughable, really.

It was one of those “asked for” times with her, depending on weather conditions which God openly controlled for us. He seems so much “for us” (two) these days. I have not lost one nameable thing by putting her and our whole affair in the simplest way possible into His hands. There has been no careful analyzing, no planning, no worrying over details in the matter. I have simply recognized love in me, declared it to her and to Him and as frankly as I could, told Him I wanted His way in it. There has been no leading thus far to engagement, but the symptoms of a beautiful courtship prevail - not perhaps a routine, or “normal” one, but a good one nonetheless, and withal, a deep sense that it is God directed.’

14 February 1953
‘Just came in from Otavalo. Gwen was tired so left us with supper and dishes alone. I am waiting for Rob to come home (he has gone to some school affair) having just kissed Betty good night at the door of her room. She was sleepy tonight - went dozing off while I was reading in this diary and then in my arms and later in my lap. She surprises me sometimes as a lover - a gay ardency, a girlishness I see in her few other times. And oh, how glad I am she knows just how much of herself to give. I could still ask that she be more aggressive with my body, but from what I already know, she will in time do very acceptably. The other night, Tuesday, I believe, we had a lunch together at the bodega and afterward a long discussion about limits to engagement relations -  everything from touching her breasts to intercourse. And when I came home so I spoke, “A garden shut up is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (Song of Sol. 4:12). She is that until marriage, by her present attitudes. The following night at the bodega she told me that we would not lie down again, choosing a variant restriction I had suggested. We came home, and at the gate she cried - for not having had enough of me that day. We walked up to the fountain and wall above Guápalo and sat on the steps. Thursday we went to Tingo with McCullys and Emma, and in the evening she and I bought wine together. I know I cannot live without her now.

Pondering downtown Romans 1:1: “Set apart unto the gospel of his Son.” Paul was separated from a family (wife and “play loving”), a business, the church fellowship in Antioch, and who knows what else, for the progress of the Gospel. How far am I “separated unto the Gospel”?

31 December 1955
‘A month of temptation. Satan and the flesh have been on me hard. How God holds my soul in His life and permits one with such wretchedness to continue in His service I cannot tell. Oh, it has been hard . . . I have been very low inside me struggling and casting myself hourly on Christ for help. Marriage is divorce from the privacy a man loves, but there is some privacy nothing can share. It is the knowledge of a sinful heart.

These are the days of the New Year’s believers’ conference on the Sermon on the Mount. Yesterday I preached and was helped on “whoever looks on a woman . . .”!

“Let spirit conquer though the flesh conspire.” ’

I have depassed myself

‘I’m already demode, depasse. I have depassed myself into a void,’ wrote R.D. Laing in his diary in the early 1970s. Born 90 years ago today, R. D. Laing was, for a time, one of the most famous psychiatrists in the world, but he eventually ran foul of the medical establishment, and his own life was dogged in family discord (he had 10 children by four women) and depression. Although an inveterate keeper of notebooks, only a few diary excerpts have been published - in a biography written by his son A. C. Laing.

Laing, an only child, was born in Glasgow on 7 October 1927. He did well at school and his parents enrolled him in Hutcheson’s Boys Grammar school. By the age of 15 he was already familiar with the writing of many European philosophers. He moved onto Glasgow University to study medicine, graduating in 1951. He was conscripted into the British Army, serving in its Netley psychiatric unit, before taking up a post at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, where he became the youngest consultant in the country. There he met, and came under the influence of, the neurosurgeon Joe Schorstein and the psychiatrist David Henderson. He married Anne Hearne in 1952, and they had five children, before divorcing. He married Jutta Werner in 1974, and they had three children. Out of wedlock, he also fathered two children with two other women.

From 1956 until 1967, Laing work in London, at the Tavistock Institute, a centre for psychotherapy, latterly as the principal investigator for the schizophrenia and family research unit. During this time, he published the first of many influential books, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, in which he offered new and controversial ideas on the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. In 1965, Laing, with others, set up the Philadelphia Association which launched a radical experiment at Kingsley Hall, London, to house and treat those seriously affected by schizophrenia without restraint or drug therapies. During its five year life, Kingsley Hall became notorious as a place where people could regress into infantile and uninhibited behaviour before, supposedly, resurfacing with a new and authentic sanity. Laing, himself, was experimenting with LSD, and is said to have taken it with Sean Connery in 1964 (before it was illegal). At this time, he was among the most famous therapists in the world.

In 1971, Laing and his family travelled to Sri Lanka to find out more about meditation from Buddhists, and to India where he learnt Sanskrit and met the guru Govinda Lama. Further books followed, The Politics of the Family (1971), The Facts of Life (1976), and The Voice of Experience (1982). In 1985, he published his autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, but, by this time, a tendency to alcoholism and depression was leading him into trouble with the medical establishment, and he gave up practising medicine. He died in 1989. Further information is available from the R. D. Laing Institute, an issue of Janus Head, Allan Beverage’s article in BJPsych Bulletin, the BBC, Wikipedia, or Adrian C. Laing’s article in The Guardian.

According to his son and biographer Adrian C. Laing, R. D. Laing was ‘an avid keeper of diaries, drafts of his books both published and unpublished, notes, scribbles, loose thoughts, recollections of dreams, jottings, correspondence, tape-recordings, transcripts of tape-recordings and press cuttings.’ As far as I can tell, none of the notebooks or diaries have been published in their own right. However, in the biography of his father - R. D. Laing: A Life (Peter Owen, 1994) - A. C. Laing does refer occasionally to the diaries, and quotes from them a few times. The following extracts (which include excerpts from his father’s diary) are taken from the 1997 paperback edition by HarperCollins.

***

‘The last entry in Ronnie’s diary that is in any way remotely concemed with ‘politics’ was made on 23 March 1970 under the heading ‘My Relation to Politics’. Here he admitted, to himself at least, that the political movement ‘is far more vast than I can comprehend and apart from its existence there is very little I can say about it’.

***

‘On 7 October 1967 Ronnie celebrated his fortieth birthday and wrote a rough entry in his diary marking “the transition from Icarus to Daedalus from Oedipus to Laius from enfant terrible to grand old man or everyman’s favourite uncle from disciple to Guru from Isaac to Abraham. From simply son to father to one of the elders who has failed. . . From Jesus to Joseph. From one of yesterdays [sic] young men of tomorrow to one of tomorrow’s old men of yesterday”.’

***

A few days after Ronnie s forty-fourth birthday on 7 October 1971, he recorded in a diary a visit to a wise man by the name of Mufti Jal al-Ud-din. The note Ronnie made of that encounter indicated what they discussed. Ronnie numbered the topics: “1. What is man’s chief end in life?; 2. What is the correct way to live?; 3. What is the method to rid oneself of the corruptions that defile the heart and weaken wisdom?” In answer to these questions, the wise man replied: “if you wish to help your fellow man there is no better way to do so than to give up the world, renounce everything and take up the robe and bowl”. This did not seem to provide Ronnie with a satisfactory answer. He wrote in his diary: “It would be a blessing were I to find the right man for me. Maybe there is not such a man, maybe I cannot recognize him.” ’

***
‘When Ronnie and his second family returned from India on 20 April 1972, much had taken place since their departure for Sri Lanka in March of the previous year. Ronnie had deliberately kept out of touch with events not just in London but the West as a whole. He had been reading a great deal but his interests were confined solely to books on Eastern theology and philosophy. He had a lot of catching up to do. Moreover, shortly after his return to London he experienced a serious collapse in his own self-confidence, prompting the following entry in his diary in May 1972: “I’ve got to keep my nerve - or lose it - everything is completely uncertain. I’ve lost my motivations and beliefs - there is nothing I want to do and I don’t want to do nothing. It’s really like starting a new life and I would be just as glad not to. I’m already demode, depasse [sic]. I have depassed myself into a void.” ’

***

‘One of most important events in Ronnie’s life in 1979 was the permanent replacement of his secretary by a woman from New Zealand - Marguerite Romayne-Kendon - for it was with Marguerite that Ronnie would spend the last few years of his life. The following year Ronnie saw many friends and other people he felt attached to pass away. He wrote in his diary on 3 August, “Sartre died two/three months ago, then Roland Barthes, yesterday Hugh Crawford. Peter Sellers and Ken Tynan.” The next month he added the name of Franco Basaglia. Before the year was out there were others to mention: David Mercer, Jesse Watkins (the sculptor who was the subject of ‘A Ten-Day Voyage’ in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise), Steve McQueen, John Lennon. Of 1980 Ronnie wrote, “death has had a good harvest this year”.

The soul of this café

‘To give you the soul of this café, I must say that the immense porch of a mosque rests its six polygonal pillars in the very midst of the benches. The capitals are carved in a very strange Spanish baroque style. Five small domes lead to an adjoining high wall, which is pierced by a high narrow door in black wood where ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays shine in a complicated linear design.’ This is from a diary kept by Le Corbusier, born 130 years ago today, when still a young man, travelling through Europe, not yet an architect, but thirsty for knowledge, observing everything, and particularly interested in buildings.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, son of a watch engraver and a piano teacher. He studied at the local art school which taught applied arts connected with watchmaking, but was encouraged by one teacher towards architecture, and he set about teaching himself. With two friends, he designed and built his first house in 1905. In the next few years, he travelled frequently in Europe meeting artists and architects, and working for some of them (including a Paris studio which was pioneering the use of reinforced concrete for domestic residences). In 1912, he built an ambitious house for his parents. This impressed a wealthy watch manufacturer who then commissioned Jeanneret to design an imposing villa.

During the war, Jeanneret taught at his old art school, and began to theorise on the use of prefabricated housing. In 1917, he moved to Paris to work as an architect on concrete structures, but was soon devoting his time to painting. With Amédée Ozenfant, he published an anti-Cubism manifesto, and established a new artistic movement - purism. It was in the first issue of the movement’s journal - L’Esprit Nouveau - that Jeanneret took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier. In 1923, he published a collection of his essays for the journal in Vers une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture), and by the mid-1920s he was actively involved in seeing his new ideas turn to reality. With his cousin Pierre and with Ozenfant, he built the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion for the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (from which the name Art Deco originated); and in 1927 he was commissioned by a Bordeaux industrialist to build a complex of worker houses, which he realised using his ideas for modular units.

In 1928, Le Corbusier helped found the International Congresses of Modern Architecture. In 1930 he took French citizenship, and he married Yvonne Gallis. As his international reputation grew, so he travelled widely, lecturing and winning contracts not only in France, but in Brazil and Russia. During the Second World War and the German occupation of France, Le Corbusier did his best to promote architectural projects, without any success, but his first public commission in ten years came after the war with Cité radieuse, a rehabilitation project in Marseilles. This was finished in 1952, the same year he was made a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur.

Among his most famous works are Ozenfant House (1922), Villa Jeanneret (1925), Villa Savoye (1928) and the Swiss Dormitory at the Cité Universitaire (1931-32) all in Paris; the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro (1936), Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp (1950-54), various buildings in Chandigarh, India (1952-59), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (1954-59), and the Carpenter Visual Art Centre, Harvard (1964). Le Corbusier died in 1965. Further information can be found at The Corbusier Foundation, The Art Story, Wikipedia, and Biography.com.

Although an inveterate keeper of notebooks with ideas and sketches, there is no obvious evidence that Le Corbusier was a diarist as such. However, as a young man, on one of his journeys through Europe, he did keep a journal, which subsequently has been referred to as a diary. On route, he sent each diary entry back to his home town to be published in a local newspaper. On his return, he considered preparing the diary for publication but the war intervened, and it was to be more than half a century before he revisited and edited the manuscript - just before his death in fact. This was published in its original French language, and not published in English until 1987, when The MIT Press brought out Journey to the East as translated by Ivan Žaknić with Nicole Pertuiset and edited by Žaknić. In 2007, MIT Press re-issued the book. The following extracts come from the original 1987 edition.

The introduction to the French edition (as translated) is worth reproducing.

‘In 1911 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a draftsman in the office of Peter Behrens in Berlin, decided with his friend, Auguste Klipstein, to undertake a journey whose destination was Constantinople. From May to October, with very little money, the two friends toured Bohemia, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

It was then that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret discovered architecture: a magnificent play of forms in light, a coherent system of the mind. During this journey from Dresden to Constantinople, and from Athens to Pompeii, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret kept a travel diary. In it he noted his impressions, and he also executed a great number of drawings which taught him to observe and to see. From these notes he extracted articles, some of which were to be published by La Feuille d’Avis of La Chaux-de-Fonds. Later he would reassemble and complete these manuscripts to form a book. The book, Le Voyage d’Orient, was to be published by Gaspard Valette of Mercure de France in 1914. However, the war prevented that publication, and the manuscript was stored among the archives of Le Corbusier. Fifty-four years after his journey, he decided at long last to publish the book that is a testimony to his wonderment and discoveries as a young man. In July 1965 he edited the manuscript and annotated it meticulously, relying on nothing more than his memory. Here then is Journey to the East, considered by Le Corbusier to be an important and revealing document on the most decisive year of his growth as an artist and as an architect.’

In fact, although there are passages which read like a diary, the whole seems to have been worked on, making it more of a memoir than a diary. Here is one extract (with a typical illustration by Corbusier).

‘A Café
I entered it by chance: I was fleeing anywhere to escape the Bazaar. Everything is cool and quiet, for age-old trees mask the sky. Huge gray, red, or white striped linens are suspended from their four corners to tree trunks, and their bellies sag to within a few meters of the ground. The foliage diffuses circles of white light that dance upon the grayish patterns of irregularly shaped paving stones. Luxurious little wicker cages in which two divans face each other and, where the coffee is prepared, form on one side an uninterrupted boundary. Turkish houses block the view threading its way into the narrowness of a winding street. To get there, I climbed an odd stone stairway and went through a pretty gate in a high wall. Numerous benches are strewn about, creating enclosures; carpets of red, black, and yellow stripes cover them. They are deep and have a back and armrests. Yet they are not used for sitting down. After taking off one’s shoes, one sits on one’s heels. In this way one assumes a very dignified position, very neat, and this does away with our own casual habit of slouching like young revelers. The coffee is served, as you know, in tiny cups, and the tea in pear-shaped glasses. Either one costs a sou, which permits refills.

A hundred Turks converse in low voices. The water gurgles in the narghiles, and the air turns blue from the smoke. We are in the land of exquisite tobaccos, and we make extravagant use of it. Only when it is out of control do we moderate it, but Auguste practically kills himself with it. Fezzes are mixed with turbans, and the long black robes with grays and blues. Here comes an old man dressed entirely in pink, which makes him look like a small child. The old people are always personable, gay, sharp-eyed, yet never helpless; prayer provides them with such health because of the exercise it requires. So these old men always smile and slip by like ferrets with some inseparable corpous under their arms.

Over my table bloom copious blue hydrangeas; elsewhere there are roses and carnations; only two steps away I can hear the singing of a little marble fountain in Turkish rococo. Cats strut about in quest of balls of yarn, and to give you the soul of this café, I must say that the immense porch of a mosque rests its six polygonal pillars in the very midst of the benches. The capitals are carved in a very strange Spanish baroque style. Five small domes lead to an adjoining high wall, which is pierced by a high narrow door in black wood where ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays shine in a complicated linear design. Bright-colored carpets spread to the rush mats beneath the domes. The muezzin has just climbed the minaret which can be seen through the foliage, and his strident call to prayer pours out, while the mats are covered by the faithful who prostrate themselves, rise, and worship Allah.

But here is a touching note characteristic of the lofty, poetic Turkish soul: among the tables are three mounds, each a few meters high and bordered by a stone wall with a fine iron railing; a lantern hung to some tree which had sprouted there burns every night to illuminate the tombstones whose worn inscriptions no doubt recall the virtues of brave men now resting between the roots of the great sycamore which rises like their soul to heaven. They must rest here among the living, so as to familiarize them with Sweet Death. All these good old men, so nice in their childlike robes of pink, blue, or white, will come every morning to greet them and to whisper in their beards: Yes, yes, soon, we are coming, we are coming. I rejoice! . . .

This place, the café of Mahmud Pasha and the little mosque with a minaret and one single large dome that rests on four bare walls, is not far from the feverish Bazaar. Auguste and I spent many evenings there.’

A mania for gossip

‘I am very much struck with the mania for gossip which now rages in society here. There seems to be no other subject of conversation in the fine company of London. The only topics that afford interest are local ones. This arises, doubtless, from the fact that, diplomacy excepted, London society is entirely national; while that of Paris, being more absolutely cosmopolitan, leads to greater familiarity with subjects of general import, and the resources of conversation are there, consequently, much less limited.’ This is from the diary, very gossipy in itself, of one Thomas Raikes, a merchant banker and dandy, who was born 240 years ago today.

Born on 3 October 1777, Raikes was educated at Eton where he became acquainted with Beau Brummel, another dandy-to-be. He visited the Continent with a private tutor to study languages, and then joined his father’s banking firm, but liked the West End clubs better. He was an early member of the Carlton Club, and was nicknamed Apollo because he rose in the east (where his banking house was in the City) and set in the west (where the clubs were). In 1802, he married Sophia Maria, daughter of Nathaniel Bayly, a proprietor in Jamaica. They had one son and three daughters. He was often abroad - The Hague, Paris, Russia - and moved permanently to France in 1833 to escape financial troubles. He returned to London in 1841, spending the next few years there or in Paris, before taking a house at Brighton, where he died in 1848. There is very little further biographical information available online, at Wikipedia, the Regency Reader, or even at Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required).

Raikes is remembered today largely because of his diary, published (1856-1858) in four volumes by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans: A Portion of the Journal kept by Thomas Raikes, Esq, from 1831 to 1847 comprising reminiscences of Social and Political Life in London and Paris during that period. All four volumes can freely read online at Internet Archive (vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 4), and a long review can be found in The Gentlemen’s Magazine (1856). Here is selection of extracts from the diary.

24 February 1832
‘The news of the cholera being in London has been received abroad. According to the feelings of the different nations towards England, France, who wishes to court us, has ordered a quarantine in her ports of three days; Holland, who feels aggrieved by our conduct at the Conference, one of forty days. The fog so thick in London, that the illuminations for the Queen’s birthday were not visible.’

5 March 1832
‘A melancholy event indeed my poor friend Henry B. destroyed himself this morning in his room at Limmer’s Hotel, Conduit Street. Continued losses at play and other pecuniary embarrassments drove him to despair, and he cut his own throat, after shaving and dressing himself completely, while the breakfast was preparing by his servant. It was an infatuation of long standing; his father had twice paid his debts to a large amount, and they were unfortunately not on speaking terms for some time past. His poor mother was burnt to death not two months ago, and he never saw her in her last moments. This sad event, and the recollection of his intimate friend, who last year drowned himself in the Serpentine from the same dreadful cause, most probably accelerated this catastrophe. He left no letter to any one, merely the following words, scribbled on the back of a kind note which he had received the preceding evening from his friend the Duke of Dorset: “I cannot pray, and am determined to rush unbidden into the presence of my God!” What a sickening thought.’

21 March 1832
‘The general fast-day for the cholera. The political unions tried to excite a tumult in the city, but failed. Upon the whole, the day was observed with much decency; the churches were well attended, the shops shut up, and the streets even more quiet than on a Sunday.’

7 May 1832
‘This evening the House of Peers met in committee on the bill; and on the first division the Government were beat by a majority of thirty-five, to their own great astonishment. Lord Grey upon this immediately adjourned the House till Thursday. He said to Lord Wharncliffe, with evident vexation, on going out of the House, “You may now take the bill, and do what you please with it.” They must, it is supposed, now, either make peers, and not less than sixty, or resign.’

8 May 1832
‘Much anxiety and gossiping at all the clubs during the day, but nothing known. Lords Grey and Brougham went down to the King at Windsor, and returned in the evening. A cabinet council was held on their return, which broke up at twelve o’clock; but nothing transpired. One circumstance alone struck me and others forcibly. Sefton was at the opera in the highest spirits possible; he came at half-past one into the supper room at Crockford’s, having most probably driven in the interim to Downing Street, and I never saw such an alteration. His face was the picture of despair and vexation.’

9 May 1832
‘Sefton’s face was a true barometer. The King has refused to make the peers, and this morning the ministers have given in their resignations, which have been accepted. Still they attended at the levee, and the King appeared cheerful. Brookes’s Club is full of weeping and gnashing of teeth, so little was the party prepared for this sudden catastrophe. No one knows to whom the King will turn for his new advisers.’

10 October 1841
‘I called on the Darners, and found them established in the house in Tilney Street, left them by Mrs. Fitzherbert. The Colonel is made Comptroller of the Queen’s Household, with which he is much pleased. I find London very much altered, and in some respects, such as the buildings and parks, very considerably improved. There is much magnificence and luxury in the great houses, and much bustle in the streets; but not that amusing variety which greet you at every step in Paris. The change in society has also become very apparent within the last few years. It was called, and perhaps justly, in my time, dissipated; but the leaders were men of sense and talent, with polished manners, and generally high-minded feelings. The young men of the day seem without any prominent feature of character; indifferent instead of fastidious; careless in their manner to the women, and making it the fashion to afficher a heartless, selfish tone of feeling, such as would not be tolerated in French society, where the women certainly maintain a social influence that is not to be observed here. There is a great deal of beauty in the London drawing-rooms; but hardly any of those égards pour les convenances which, abroad, is the simplest and most natural form of high breeding, and which is shown in dress as well as in manner and in language. Steam has here dissolved the exclusive system, and seems to have substituted the love of wealth for both the love of amusement and of social distinction.’

21 October 1841
‘I am very much struck with the mania for gossip which now rages in society here. There seems to be no other subject of conversation in the fine company of London. The only topics that afford interest are local ones. This arises, doubtless, from the fact that, diplomacy excepted, London society is entirely national; while that of Paris, being more absolutely cosmopolitan, leads to greater familiarity with subjects of general import, and the resources of conversation are there, consequently, much less limited.’

25 January 1842
‘The day of the royal christening at Windsor. The Prince of Wales is named Albert Edward. All who have been there say that the scene was very magnificent, and the display of plate at the banquet superb. After the ceremony a silver embossed vessel, containing a whole hogshead of mulled claret, was introduced, and served in bucketfulls to the company, who drank the young Prince’s health. Very few ladies were invited.’

3 February 1842
‘The Queen opened the Parliament in person, attended by the King of Prussia, who sat on her right hand. The Speech, of course, only deals in general allusions to the future measures. The Address was moved by Lord March, eldest son of the Duke of Richmond, which shows that the agricultural interests are not angry. The Duke of Beaufort is come to town, and has received his Garter.’

4 February 1842
‘The debates last night seem to have given general satisfaction. Peel spoke in a very business-like manner, and expressed his determination to lose no time in bringing forward his measures, which were all ready and prepared. He has named Wednesday for the Corn Laws. There is no opposition to the Address.’

31 March 1842
‘I went with Yarmouth to view the property at Strawberry Hill, which is to be sold next month by order of the proprietor, Lord Waldegrave. Here are all the collections of Horace Waipole. There are a few good pictures, but all the rest are of little value. After dinner I went to the mock trials at the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street. There is one man who imitates Brougham very well as counsel, but the subject of debate was coarse, and the audience very vulgar.’

6 May 1842
‘As Lord and Lady Willoughby were coming to dinner yesterday, at General Freemantle’s, where I dined, their carriage drove over a child in Parliament Street, but fortunately without doing it much harm. A mob, of course, was drawn together to the spot; but all agreed that the coachman was by no means in fault, and Lord Willoughby got out of the carriage, and saw that every kind attention was paid to it. How different was the conduct of a French mob, three years ago, in Paris! The old Duchesse de Dodeauville, passing over the Pont Neuf in her carriage, the coachman by accident drove over a child and killed it on the spot. The mob assembled with frightful cries, and called out, “ A la riviere, a la riviere!” meaning to throw the old duchess over the bridge, which they would have executed if the Garde Municipale had not been attracted by the noise. Foiled in this attempt, they picked up the bleeding body of the child, threw it into the old lady’s lap, and made the coachman drive away with it.’

30 May 1842
‘As the Queen was returning home to the palace with Prince Albert this afternoon, descending Constitution Hill, a villain approached the open carriage and fired at her, but fortunately the pistol snapped in the pan. He was immediately secured. It is now known that the same individual made a similar attempt yesterday evening, which was hushed up. The Privy Council was instantly assembled for the examination of the culprit.’

18 June 1842
‘Francis, who fired at the Queen, has been tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty, and sentenced to death. It is hoped by all that the Queen will not interfere to save his life.’

21 June 1842
‘Francis has been overwhelmed with despair since his condemnation; he asserts that the pistol was not loaded with ball, that he had no wish to hurt the Queen, but that his sole object was to obtain notoriety, and be shut up for life like Oxford, where he would be sure of a relief from his poverty, and support at the public Expense.’

3 July 1842
‘This morning another attack was made on the Queen’s life as she was going in her carriage to the Chapel Royal. A humped-back boy presented a pistol at her, which only snapped in the pan; he was arrested by a boy named Docket, who gave him in charge to two police officers, who treated it as a joke, and the young rascal escaped. This may be imputed to the culpable laxity of our Government, who, on the preceding day, remitted the sentence of Francis, and condemned him only to transportation to a penal settlement in Tasmania. There seems to be a general apathy about everything in this country; there is no longer the same interest in politics, the struggle of parties seems finished; Peel is supposed to be in the ascendant, but the ultra Tories are incensed against him for his liberal tendencies. Though all around is a calm, it may be only that which portends a fatal storm.’

16 July 1842
‘I called on the Duke of Wellington this morning; he says the news from France has astounded all the diplomates in London, and gives the most fearful apprehensions for the future, as well for France as for all Europe.’

26 September 1843
‘Clanwilliam mentioned this evening an incident, which proves the wonderful celerity of the railroads. M. Isidore, the Queen’s coiffeur, who receives 200l. a year for dressing Her Majesty’s hair twice a day, had gone to London in the morning, meaning to return to Windsor in time for her toilet; but on arriving at the station he was just five minutes too late, and saw the train depart without him. His horror was great, as he knew that his want of punctuality would deprive him of his place, as no train would start for the next two hours. The only resource was to order a special train, for which he was obliged to pay 18l.; but the establishment feeling the importance of his business, ordered extra steam to be put on, and conveyed the anxious hairdresser eighteen miles in eighteen minutes, which extricated him from all his difficulties.’

9 October 1843
‘This morning, at breakfast, Arbuthnot gave the account of an extensive gang of swindlers in London, who had been lately detected by the Lord Mayor, and remarked how credulous and gullible the English tradesmen were, in becoming such easy dupes to their plots and rogueries.’

6 May 1844
‘What a difference there is between Paris and London. You may walk through the latter from Hyde Park Corner to Wapping, and with the exception of a few old churches, the Tower, and the Monument, you see nothing that calls to mind the ancient history of the country. Here every street is a memoria technica of some anecdote in former times. The one is all poetry, the other is all prose.’

27 May 1844
‘That arch-gambler Crockford is dead, and has left an immense fortune. He was originally a low fishmonger in Fish-street Hill, near the monument, then a leg at Newmarket and keeper of hells in London. He finally set up the club in St. James’s Street opposite to White’s with a hazard bank, by which he won all the disposable money of the men of fashion in London, which was supposed to be near two millions.’

The Diary Junction

Diary briefs

Jack the Ripper’s diary? - Mango Books, Fox News, The Telegraph

Diaries of Victoria and Abdul - Mail Online, English Heritage

Jim Maultsaid’s third WWI diary - Pen & Sword Books, Warfare Magazine

The curious world of Pepys and Evelyn - Yale University Press, The Spectator

Diary details on slave burials - The New York Times, DNA

Australian minister’s secret diary - Brisbane Times

Diaries of Nigeria’s kidnap girls - Reuters, Africa News

Walter Hadley’s diary published - Stuff, NZC

Margaret Forster’s teenage diaries - The Telegraph, The Guardian

My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin - Arcade Publishing, Salon

Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems, Ugly Duckling Presse, The Paris Review

Rocky Boyer's War - US Naval Institute, Foreword Reviews

NZ war hero diaries online - Auckland War Memorial Museum

Rare travel diary online - The University of British Columbia, CBC News

25 Andy Warhol diary entries - Flavorwire

Diaries of WW2 military wife - Sphere, Goodreads, Chronicle Live