Writing for you, Sasha

It’s a year to the day since the death of Hana Pravda, a Czech-born actress who had lived and worked in Britain since the late 1950s. Although not a household name, she appeared in many much-loved British series, and directed plays in the theatre also. However, in recent years, she became better known thanks to an extraordinary diary she had kept during the Second World War, and which was only rediscovered in the 1990s and then published to much acclaim.

Hana was born in 1916 at her grandparents’ house in Prague, into a middle class Jewish family. Her father trained as a lawyer but joined the Austro-Hungarian army; her mother died while she was still at school. Aged only 17 Hana acted in her first film, and she then went to study acting under Alexei Dikii in Leningrad. On returning to Prague, she married Alexander (Sasha) Munk, a student activist at the time, and the two of them moved to a small town in eastern Bohemia where they thought they would be safe from the Nazi persecution of Jews.

In 1942, however, they were captured and interned in various camps. Hana survived the war, but Sasha died at Kraslice, only days before the Germans surrendered in May 1945. Subsequently, Hana returned to acting. She married George Pravda, and they emigrated first to Australia and then to the UK, where she appeared frequently in television dramas, such as Survivors, Danger Man, Z-Cars and Tales of the Unexpected. She also directed many plays at the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead, and continued to act for radio productions well into her 80s. She died on 22 May 2008, a year ago today, and was recognised by several of the British broadsheets with long obituaries - The Guardian, for example. Wikipedia also has a short bio.

All the obituaries mention her extraordinary diary, published to great acclaim in 2000 by Oxford-based Day Books - I Was Writing This Diary For You, Sasha. Here is how The Times describes the diary’s reappearance: ‘On Christmas Eve 1995 a parcel arrived at her London flat. It contained her wartime diary, barely legible, in its flimsy red notebook, and a photograph of Sasha. She had had to leave it behind in Prague in 1948. Attempts had been made to send it on, but it had been mislaid and forgotten for decades until a friend who had emigrated to Australia rediscovered it. After hesitating for fear of reviving old wounds she sent it on to Pravda, who initially ‘scrabbled on my hands and knees, reading snatches - I wanted to devour it’. ’

Day Books says: ‘Few diaries can have been written in more extraordinary circumstances than the one which a young Czech actress kept during the last few months of World War II. Not only was she on the run from the Nazis, following her dramatic escape from captivity: she was also searching desperately for her husband, whom she had last seen when they were prisoners together at Auschwitz.’ And it provides this quote from Hana’s diary: ‘One afternoon we saw a group of male prisoners walking past in the distance - too far away to talk to. They were clutching their grey prison blankets round their bodies, and all we could see of their faces were their huge staring eyes. They moved as slowly as ghosts. Would I recognise my Sasha among them? Would he recognise me? I think about him all the time.’

Other extracts can be found on Czech websites, such as Czech Radio.

20 November 1945
‘I am in Prague. It’s eight years since you kissed me for the first time, Sasha.
After my show tonight we went to the U Šupů Restaurant, but it was all closed up, and inside it was completely dark. Now I am sitting in our favourite coffeehouse, the Union, at our table in the middle room. I’m warming my hands on a cup of tea, just as I used to in the old days. The street hasn’t changed at all. You’re sitting opposite me. Your mother has just left us. You’re the only person for me in the whole world . . . The only one. The world is empty and I can’t stand it. I want to die.’

30 November 1945 (the diary’s last entry)
‘My dearest. My beloved. Ask God to forgive me. Pray for my soul - the soul I am losing. I don’t want to live with a shattered soul. Please help me to die.’

In recent years, Edward Fenton, who runs Day Books, has given a few snapshots of Hana in his blog - A Publisher’s Diary - on the Day Books website. Here’s a couple of entries:

4 January 2009
‘ ‘I did not succeed in killing myself,’ Holocaust survivor Hana Pravda wrote on 4 January 1996. A few days earlier, her lost diary had been sent to her by a friend in Australia, and memories had come flooding back to her. After the war she had been so distressed that she had seriously considered suicide, and the diary ends on that note. Such despair wasn’t typical of her; she was always a fighter. It was a privilege for me to be able to work with her, and to publish her diary - along with the epilogue which she wrote over 50 years later, on this day 13 years ago.’

1 February 2006
‘To Greek Street for Hana Pravda’s surprise birthday party in a little private room above a place called the Gay Hussar. Hana had been expecting to have a family dinner, and hadn’t known till the very last minute that so many of her friends would be coming to pay tribute to her. Her three granddaughters were there - and her grandson, who’d flown in from the US - and various friends from her long career, including Tom Conti, who was clearly the guest of honour as far as Mrs Pravda was concerned. But tonight she was the star. What an amazing life she’s had - and how amazing that she was there - still.’

Albéniz and Liszt (or not)

It’s one hundred years exactly since Isaac Albéniz, Spanish composer and virtuoso pianist, died. His early life was marked by brilliance and motion, and, as an adult, he never really settled anywhere permanently, living in Madrid, Paris and London. During some periods, he kept a diary - but he didn’t always tell it the truth, as when he claimed to have met Liszt.

Albéniz was born in Catalonia, Spain, in 1860. His mother, Dolors Pascual, was a native of Figueres, and his father, Àngel Albéniz, was a civil servant posted in Ripolles but then in other places. By the age of four Albéniz was playing the piano in public and was considered something of a child prodigy. At seven he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but went instead to Madrid to study there.

In his early teens, Albéniz made several attempts to run away from home, supporting himself with concert tours. Eventually, his father accepted his wish to play, and he toured as far afield as South America. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory when 14 for a short while, before further studies in Brussels. In 1880, he went to Budapest wanting to meet Franz Liszt - of which more below.

In 1883, Albéniz settled in Madrid to teach, and to study with Felipe Pedrell, who inspired him to write Spanish music. During the 1890s, he lived mostly in London and Paris, composing for the stage, often in collaboration with Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, who provided both librettos and funding. But, by 1900, he had begun to suffer from Bright’s disease. This didn’t stop him working, though he returned to piano music, and, in the last years of his life, composed Iberia - a suite of twelve piano impressions evoking the spirit of Spain - which is considered to be his best work. Albéniz died exactly 100 years ago today, on 18 May 1909.

There is plenty of information about Albéniz on the internet in English - Wikipedia, the website of Barcelona-based composer Mac McClure, and the Gaudí All Gaudí website all have biographies. There is also a small amount of information about Albéniz keeping a diary, but no evidence of it having been published in English. In particular, there is one incident - the Liszt incident - sourced from Albéniz’s diary that is regularly referred to in biographies.

Here is the relevant diary extract (dated August 1880 and lifted from the online version of Paul Mast’s 1974 doctoral thesis for the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester): ‘I have visited Liszt. He received me in the most amiable manner. I played two of my Etudes and a Hungarian Rhapsody. To all appearances he was much pleased with me, especially when I improvised a complete dance on a Hungarian theme which he gave me. He asked me all sorts of questions about Spain, my parents, my religious opinions, and, finally, about music in general. I told him quite frankly and decidedly that I gave no thought to any of those things, which seemed to please him. I am to return the day of after tomorrow.’

But the Gaudí All Gaudí website as above, says: ‘Albéniz noted in his diary that he met Liszt in Budapest on August 18, 1880, an impossible feat given that Liszt had taken up residence in Weimer by then. He was given to the exhibitionism of a child prodigy, as when he would play the piano blindfolded or with his back to the piano, or place a cloth over the keys to make the task even more difficult. Therefore his diary, though undoubtedly helpful in studying his character, is peppered with several passages that require a certain scrutiny, or at least an ability to separate fact from fiction.’

Yale Fineman, a music librarian, at the University of Maryland, says in an essay, dated 2004, that the diary entry about Lizst ‘was probably meant to placate his father who helped fund this excursion’, i.e. to Budapest.

Further extracts from Albéniz’s diary can be found in Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic by Walter Aaron Clark, first published by Oxford University Press in 1999 - many pages of which can be read online at Googlebooks.

Clark says: ‘In their fixation on the Liszt episode, biographers have neglected other passages in his diary that tell us much more important things about the young man. For instance, at an outdoor religious ceremony in Budapest on the 20th, Albéniz notes a ‘high degree of religious intolerance’ among the locals when a man is beaten by the mob for neglecting to doff his hat as the sacrament passes. This behaviour he finds simply ‘stupid’.’

In the days after the (made-up) meeting with Liszt, the diary contains no further mention of the man, and instead focuses on sightseeing, money problems, and the need for patience in ‘conquering’ a lovely young girl he has met, all his normal ‘methods’ of conquest having failed.

And here are some extracts from much later in Albéniz’s life (thanks also to the Clark biography).

21 February 1901
‘Those who search for God, those who discuss him, seem to me like those who wish to find a three-legged cat; they forget that it has four, and that God does not exist except in the here and now, that is to say while we live, think and express ourselves; thus we are God, and everything else is songs!!!’

11 March 1901
‘My misfortune is great; I am foolish with aspirations!!!.’

20 April 1904
‘The ideal formula in art ought to be ‘variety within logic’.’

Without seeing you

‘My Pierre, I think of you without end, my head is bursting with it and my reason is troubled. I do not understand that I am to live henceforth without seeing you, without smiling at the sweet companion of my life.’ These are some of the heart-rending words Marie Curie wrote in a diary after the death of her husband, Pierre Curie, with whom she had won the Nobel Prize for Physics three years earlier. Pierre, born one and a half centuries ago today, also kept a diary, at least when he was a young man.

Pierre Curie was born in Paris - 150 years ago today on 15 May 1859 - and educated at home by his father. Although he showed a strong aptitude for mathematics, lack of funds led him to take a laboratory job, in the Sorbonne faculty of sciences, rather than to full time study. As early as 1880, though, he and his older brother, Jacques, showed how an electric potential could be generated when crystals were compressed (piezoelectricity). By 1882, he had been put in charge of all practical work within the Sorbonne’s physics and industrial chemistry schools, but it wasn’t until 1895 that he obtained his doctorate - based on pioneering studies of magnetism - and was appointed Professor of Physics.

That same year, Curie married Marie Sklodowska, a Polish student of his, and they would have two daughters, Irène and Ève. Collaborating, Pierre and Marie were the first to isolate radioactive substances - radium and polonium - by fractionation of pitchblende in 1898; and they were the first to coin the term ‘radioactive’. Their research formed the basis for many subsequent developments in nuclear physics and chemistry. Together, and jointly with French physicist Henri Becquerel, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

In April 1906, Pierre died after his skull was fractured when he fell under the wheel of a horse-drawn vehicle on a rainy night. Further information on Pierre and Marie can be found at Wikipedia, on the Nobel Prize website, and at the American Institute of Physics.

The death of Pierre was a terrible tragedy for Marie. We know a lot about her feelings at the time because soon after her husband’s death she started writing a diary, the only one she ever kept. Years later, her daughter used some quotes from it for a much celebrated biography of her mother. The full text of Madame Curie - A Biography by Eve Curie, as translated by Vincent Sheean and published by Doubleday & Company in 1937, is available at Internet Archive. Some extracts of the diary (taken from Eve’s book) are also available on the website of the American Institute of Physics.

Here is how Eve introduces her mother’s diary: ‘After some weeks had passed, Marie, incapable of speaking of her woe before human beings, lost in a silence, a desert which sometimes made her cry out with horror, was to open a gray notebook and hurl onto the paper, with writing which trembled, the thoughts that were stifling her. Through these scratchy, tear-splotched pages, of which only fragments can be published, she addressed Pierre, called upon him and asked him questions. She tried to fix every detail of the drama which had separated them in order to torture herself with it forever afterward. The brief, intimate diary the first and the only one Marie ever kept reflected the most tragic hours of this woman’s life.’

And here are some extracts about Pierre.

Undated
‘We put you into the coffin Saturday morning, and I held your head up for this move. We kissed your cold face for the last time. Then a few periwinkles from the garden on the coffin and the little picture of me that you called “the good little student” and that you loved. It is the picture that must go with you into the grave, the picture of her who had the happiness of pleasing you enough so that you did not hesitate to offer to share your life with her, even when you had seen her only a few times. You often told me that this was the only occasion in your life when you acted without hesitation, with the absolute conviction that you were doing well. My Pierre, I think you were not wrong. We were made to live together, and our union had to be.

Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more. I didn’t allow them to cover it with the horrible black cloth. I covered it with flowers and I sat beside it. . .

They came to get you, a sad company; I looked at them, and did not speak to them. We took you back to Sceaux, and we saw you go down into the big deep hole. Then the dreadful procession of people. They wanted to take us away. Jacques and I resisted. We wanted to see everything to the end. They filled the grave and put sheaves of flowers on it. Everything is over, Pierre is sleeping his last sleep beneath the earth; it is the end of everything, everything, everything. . .’

7 May 1906
‘My Pierre, I think of you without end, my head is bursting with it and my reason is troubled. I do not understand that I am to live henceforth without seeing you, without smiling at the sweet companion of my life.’

11 May 1906
‘My Pierre, I got up after having slept rather well, relatively calm. That was only a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again - like a wild beast.’

14 May 1906
‘My little Pierre, I want to tell you that the laburnum is in flower, the wisteria, the hawthorn and the iris are beginning - you would have loved all that. I want to tell you, too, that I have been named to your chair, and that there have been some imbeciles to congratulate me on it. I want to tell you that I no longer love the sun or the flowers. The sight of them makes me suffer. I feel better on dark days like the day of your death, and if I have not learned to hate fine weather it is because my children have need of it.’

There is some evidence of Pierre Curie having written a diary as a young man, but I can find (on the internet) only three extracts. The first two are from Eve Curie’s book, as above, and the last, brief one is from the Institut Curie website.

‘Woman loves life for the living of it far more than we do: women of genius are rare. Thus, when we, driven by some mystic love, wish to enter upon some anti-natural path, when we give all our thoughts to some work which estranges us from the humanity nearest us, we have to struggle against women. The mother wants the love of her child above all things, even if it should make an imbecile of him. The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love. The struggle almost always is unequal, for women have the good side of it: it is in the name of life and nature that they try to bring us back.’

‘What shall I be later on? I am very rarely all under command at once; ordinarily a portion of my being is asleep. It seems to me that my mind gets clumsier every day. Before, I flung myself into scientific or other divagations; today I barely touch on subjects and do not allow myself to be absorbed by them any more. And I have so many, many things to do! Is my poor mind then so feeble that it cannot act upon my body? Is thought itself unable to move my poor mind? Then it is worth very little! And Pride, Ambition couldn’t they at least propel me, or will they let me live like this ? In my imagination I shall find most confidence to pull myself out of the rut. Imagination may perhaps entice my mind and carry it away. But I am very much afraid that imagination, too, may be dead . . .’

‘Life should be made into a dream and a dream into a reality.’

Happy birthday

The Diary Junction Blog is one year old today.

It’s been a fun journey, absorbing diarists from all corners of the planet (Brazil to Japan, Australia to Spain) and a wide range of topics such as politics, sport, travel and relationships.

Thank you to anyone and everyone who’s dropped by for a read.

Paul

Egyptian diary in Pisa

An Italian diary, nearly two centuries old and detailing archaeological sites in Egypt that were subsequently destroyed, has just been found in a library at Pisa university. The diary was written by Dr Alessandro Ricci, an explorer, draughtsman and medical doctor. There is not much information about him on the internet, though he took part in the important Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt with Ippolito Rosellini, said to be the father of Italian Egyptology. Oh, and he died of a scorpion sting.

Last month, the Italian news service Ansa revealed the story of Dr Alessandro Ricci’s diary; and, since then, it’s been widely reproduced across the internet, but without any additional facts or embellishment. So, most of the information in this article is based on the Ansa-sourced story (as on the Archaelogy Daily News website, for example).

Ricci was born in Siena and left Italy in 1817 to travel to Egypt, staying first in Alexandria and then travelling through Nubia, where he found tribal fighting and hostility from the local governor. In 1820, while in Cairo, he joined a military expedition to the Siwa Oasis - 560km west of Cairo - organised by the Viceroy Muhammed Ali, who is sometimes called the founder of modern Egypt (see Wikipedia). Indeed it was Ali who claimed the Siwa Oasis for Egypt. During the trip, Ricci carefully copied inscriptions he found at the temple of Amun and mapped out the area around the oasis. Later that year, he travelled to Suez and to Mount Sinai, where he spent some time at St Catherine’s Monastery.

In 1821, Ricci returned to southern Egypt, joining another military expedition, this one led by Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha. He returned to Italy in 1822 and set to work organising the drawings and notes he had made in Egypt. A few years later, in 1828, these notes would be of much service when he returned to Egypt, serving as a draughtsman and doctor, on the so-called Franco-Tuscan expedition. This was organised by a French philologist, Jean-Francois Champollion, and Ippolito Rosellini, of Pisa university, who would later be called the father of Italian Egyptology (see The Travellers in Egypt website). It lasted a year, and explored up river on the Nile as far as Wadi Halfa, but soon after it was over Ricci was bitten by a scorpion. He was paralysed and eventually died in 1834.

Ricci’s journal - the one that has just been rediscovered - concerns his first period in Egypt, the five years to 1822. ‘This is an exceptional find for the field of Egyptology,’ said Marilina Betro, the professor heading a Pisa university team researching the Franco-Tuscan expedition. This is partly because, Betro explains, Ricci describes and draws sites that were already destroyed by the time of Champollion-Rosellini expedition, but also because he writes about much more along the way, ‘the customs and habits of the people he met, the fighting strategies of armies, the condition of women and even the treatment of animals’.

The whereabouts of Ricci’s journal appears to have been a mystery for decades. Ricci gave it to Champollion in 1827, prior to the Franco-Tuscan expedition, apparently believing the French expert would publish it. But then both Champollion and Ricci died a few years later. Although Rosellini asked French authorities to return the journal to Italy in 1836, it remained in France.

The diary then vanished for several decades until surfacing in 1928, when an Italian architect working for King Fuad I of Egypt bought it in a Cairo bookshop (these details are all from the Ansa news story). This architect showed it to the Italian Egyptologist Angelo Sammarco, who recognised its value and was keen to organise its publication. A synopsis of the diary appeared in 1930 but the project never got any further. After he died in 1948, all trace of the journal vanished - until recently, when it was found at Pisa university by researcher Daniele Salvoldi.

‘Now, two centuries after it was written, our goal is to get this book published,’ said Betro.

(Postscript: See From Siena to Nubia: Alessandro Ricci in Egypt and Sudan, 1817-22 published in 2018 by Bloomsbury.)

Impropriety in the pew

Poor John Skinner. His parishioners just wouldn’t stop messing about in church, something which made him very grumpy. One hundred and eighty years ago today, for example, he was complaining to his diary: ‘I said aloud that, as there had been great impropriety of behaviour in that pew, I requested there might be no repetition of it this evening. John Rossiter stood up in the pew and looked very insolently at me, but I took no notice.’ Skinner did have other reasons to be grumpy and he would, a few years later, do away with himself.

Skinner was born in Claverton, near Bath in 1772,  and educated first at Cheam School then at Trinity College, Cambridge. After reading for an MA he entered Lincoln’s Inn but soon decided on the church for a career, and was ordained priest in 1799. After a brief curacy at Brent Knoll in Somerset, he took over the living at Camerton, Somerset. He married and had five children, but his wife died young, and his eldest daughter, Laura also died. Thereafter, he seems to have been mostly unhappy, with no intellectual companionship and regular feuds with farmers. He took refuge in studying antiquities, and undertook many exceptions of ancient sites in the southwest. He committed suicide, in 1839, by shooting himself in a wood nearby his home.

Skinner is largely remembered, however, because he wrote a diary, nearly 100 volumes of which are stored in the British Library. An essay by Virginia Woolf on Skinner (made available thanks to Ms Spachman on a website devoted to Woolf) provides a little more biographical information, most of it culled, in fact, from the diaries. Wikipedia and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required) also have some further details.

These diaries were first edited by Howard Coombs and Rev Arthur N Bax and published by John Murray, London, in 1930 as Journal of a Somerset Rector. Bax says the diaries are filled with sketches and records of tours of little general interest. If he visited the British Museum, Bax explains, he would begin to catalogue its contents, and hundreds of pages are filled with archaeological detail and theory - ‘mostly dead stuff’. Nevertheless, he adds, Skinner’s observations about his parish do throw light on the life of a Somerset village at the beginning of the 19th century.

Bax also suggests that the Skinner’s diaries come to life after the death of his wife and daughter. Here is more from his introduction: ‘His wife and daughter died of consumption, the daughter was laid in the same grave as her mother, and when after her death he examined a cabinet he had given her for her collections of coins and shells, he found everything was arranged with the utmost neatness, and she had some years before begun to keep a Journal. This last blow came near to breaking his spirit, though he struggled gallantly to resist the tendency of his life to shrivel, and from this time the extracts of the Journal tell their own story.

Hitherto, the Journal had been little more than a record of his archaelogical explorations and of his tours; but now that his wife and Laura are both gone, it becomes his confidant. His books are ‘his friends and consoler’; he finds them ‘the same to-day, to-morrow, and the next day.’ In the Journal he records the daily happenings, his reflections on them, and the actors in them. It becomes the mirror of his feelings; in it he makes confession, and as he turns its back pages he judges himself.’

Thelma Wilcox has a piece about Skinner on her North Stoke blog, and picks out one or two diary entries. Here is one from 1820, a few months after the death of his daughter.

‘I could not help thinking how differently this morning was to be spent by myself, an obscure imdividual, on the desolate heights of Mendip, and the Queen of these realms in the midst of her judges in the most splendid metropolis in the world. Yet when half the number of years have rolled away which these tumuli have witnessed how will every memorial, every trace, be forgotten of the agitation which now fills every breast; all the busy heads and aching hearts will be as quiet as those of the savage chieftains which have so long occupied these hillocks.’

As the diary progresses, Skinner seems to get grumpier and grumpier, and there is much about quarrels with members of his own family. But he also seems to lose patience with his parishioners. Here is Skinner confiding in his diary exactly 180 years ago today.

10 May 1829
‘During the Prayers at Morning Service Cottle’s son was hawking so loud when I commenced the service I was obliged to look at him in order to check him from interrupting the service. The pew which Burfitt built without any authority from me or the Ordinary, has been more than once the scene of great impropriety of behaviour during Church time, for the sides being higher than the seatings, so that the congregation are not able to see the people who are sitting down, they talk and laugh and misbehave themselves greatly. This evening the pew was filled by two sons and a daughter of farmer Skuse, a son of Hicks, John Rossiter, and a female in mourning; the elder Skuse I saw talking and laughing with the person in black, and I said aloud that, as there had been great impropriety of behaviour in that pew, I requested there might be no repetition of it this evening. John Rossiter stood up in the pew and looked very insolently at me, but I took no notice.’

The Diary Junction

A soldier of fortune

General Patrick Gordon, a Scottish-born soldier of fortune who became a friend and military adviser to Russia’s Peter the Great, is today being celebrated and discussed at a conference organised by University of Aberdeen. Also today, the conference is hosting a party to launch the first volume of a new and complete set of Gordon’s diaries in the original English - although, it seems, three volumes have already been published! A complete German version was printed over 150 years ago, but until now only extracts have ever been published in English (and those extracts are freely available on the internet).

Gordon was born in 1635 into a landholding family in Auchleuchries, Scotland, but he went abroad, to Poland, to study at a Jesuit college. In 1655, war broke out between Poland and Sweden, and Gordon turned to soldiering, fighting for both sides on different occasions, until 1660 when peace was signed. The following year he joined the Russian army under Tsar Aleksei I, where he remained under successive regimes, while also studying military techniques. In 1678, he defended Chigirin (now in Ukraine) when beseiged by the Turks; and, in the 1680s, he was promoted to general after warring with the Crimean Tartars.

During the 1689 revolution in Moscow, Gordon and his troops played a decisive role in favor of Tsar Peter I against the Regent, Sophia Alekseyevna. Subsequently, he became the Tsar’s close friend and chief military adviser, and was allowed to train the army according to European methods. When Peter was travelling in Europe, in 1698, Gordon quashed a revolt by the Strelitzes who were trying to restore Sophia to the throne. He died in 1699 with the Tsar at his bedside.

Gordon wrote a diary for much of his life, and this was preserved in manuscript form in the archives of the Imperial Russian foreign office. A complete German translation, edited by Dr Maurice Possalt, was published in the mid-19th century; but only parts of the diary ever appeared in English, in 1859, thanks to the Spalding Club which published Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries (AD 1635–AD 1699).

However, according to an Aberdeen university press release and conference schedule, the first volume of a full set of Gordon’s diaries in English is now being published. In fact, a launch party is taking place today (8 May) at the conference convened by the university especially to discuss Patrick Gordon (and the Scottish diaspora in Eastern Europe).

Professor Paul Dukes, who worked with the university’s Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies to bring about publication of the diary, says ‘Gordon was a truly remarkable man and the diary is an outstanding historical source . . . He was a fascinating and very accomplished character resembling many before and after him, who left Scotland to make their way in life and had a profound effect on the history of their adopted land. Now, with the publication of his diary in Scotland, and in his own tongue at that, he has at last come home.’

The diary is being edited by Dr Dmitry Fedosov and is to be published in six volumes by MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica, a company established in 1992 by the Russian Academy of Sciences and US company Pleiades Publishing. (All volumes and editions can be found at the Aberdeen University Online Store - search for Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, 1635-1699.)

A short essay on Gordon’s diary can be found on the website of Xenophon Group International (which says it was set up to promote the study of military history). One passage relates to how Gordon came to enter the Russian army. Quoting from the essay: ‘They arrived at Moscow on 2 September 1661 and were allowed an audience with the Tsar. The Tsar thanked Gordon for his kindness to Russian prisoners in Poland. On 6 September the boyar, Elia Danielovich Miloslavski, took Gordon and his comrades to a field. He was the Tsar’s father-in-law and in charge of the ‘Stranger’ Prikaz. At the field the boyar ordered the officers to demonstrate their skill with the musket and pike. This Gordon did not consider proper, as an officer’s job did not include such menial tasks. Gordon related:

‘Wee found the Boyar there before us, who ordered us to take up pike and musquets (being there ready) and show how wee could handle our armes; wherewith being surprised, I told him, that if I had knowne of this, I should have brought forth one of my boyes, who perhaps could handle armes better as I myself; adding, that it was the least part of an officer to know how to handle armes, conduct being the most materiall. Whereat, he, takeing me up short, told me, that the best colonell coming into this countrey must do so; to which I replyed, Seeing it is the fashion, I am content. And so haveing handled the pike and musket, with all their postures, to his great satisfaction, I returned.’ ’

But far more of Gordon’s diary can be found on the internet. The 1859 Spalding Club edition - Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries (AD 1635–AD 1699) - is freely available at Internet Archive. Here is Gordon’s own short introduction at the start of the diary:

‘I AM not ignorant that it is thought as hard a taske for any man to writt the story of his own lyfe, and narrative of his actions, as for one artist truly to draw his owne picture ; yet, haveing proposed to my self to writt only by way of a journall, without makeing any reflections by blameing or commending any of the passages of my lyfe (following herein the counsell of Cato, Nee te laudaveris, nec te culpaveris ipse), I think it not uneasy especially not intending it for publick view, as also leaving to others, if any shall take paines to read it, the free censure of any thing here done. I have mentioned no more of publick effaires as came to my knowledge relateing rumours for such and thruths for verity. Some publick effaires (military I meane, for with those of state I have medled very litle, being out of my spheare) I have touched in a continued series, and others interlaced with the story of my owne lyfe (defective, I confess, and that for want of documents and intelligence) being such things the most whereof I have been present at and seen myself. To conclude, I cannot tell you a better or truer reason for writing this, as that it is to please my owne fancy, not being curious of pleasing any bodyes else, seing omnibus placere hath been reckoned as yet among the impossibilia.’

And here are several extracts from the very end of Gordon’s diary:

2 July 1698
‘To-day, seventy men were hanged by fives and threes on one gallows. Numbers more were sent away to confinement.’

4 July 1698
‘In the morning, the four Strelitzes condemned last Saturday were brought out and beheaded. With few exceptions, all those executed submitted to their fate with great indifference, without saying a word, only crossing themselves; some took leave of the lookers-on. One hundred and thirty had been executed, about seventy had been killed in the engagement or died of their wounds, eighteen hundred and forty-five been sent to various convents and prisons, and twenty-five remained in this convent.’

July 1698
‘The tidings of the formidable revolt of the Strelitzes reached the Czar at Vienna, towards the end of July, and hastened his journey homewards.’

17 September 1698
‘Many Strelitzes were brought up and put to the torture, his Majesty being desirous to institute a stricter examination than ours.’

19 September 1698
‘I was unwell and kept the house. A sharp enquiry was made into the Strelitz business.’

20 September 1698
‘More Strelitzes put to the question. A number were directed to prepare for death.’

3 October 1698
‘I was at Preobraschensk, and saw the crocodile, swordfish, and other curiosities, which his Majesty had brought from England and Holland.’

1 November 1698
‘Orders were issued not to give support to any of the wives or children of the executed‘ Strelitzes.’

31 December 1698 (the last entry)
‘Almighty God be praised for his gracious long suffering towards me in sparing my life so long. Grant, gracious God, that I may make a good use of the time that thou mayest be pleased yet to grant me for repentance. This year I have felt a sensible decrease of health and strength. Yet thy will be done, gracious God!’

Humboldt’s genius

It is one hundred and fifty years since the death of the great German geographer Alexander von Humboldt. When travelling, it seems, he was a careful and meticulous diarist, although I cannot find any published editions of his diaries in English. However, a large collection of letters to his friend Karl Varnhagen von Ense along with many diary entries by Varnhagen about Humboldt is widely available on the internet.

A detailed biography of Alexander von Humboldt can be found at Wikipedia, and a briefer one at ThoughtCo. He was born in Germany, in 1769, into a prominent Pomeranian family, his father being an officer in the Prussian army. He enrolled in various universities, before undertaking geology at the Freiberg technical university, where he studied under the famous geologist A G Werner. In 1792, when still only 22, he was appointed government mines inspector in Franconia, Prussia. Five years later, his mother died leaving him a wealthy man, and he soon set about planning a major expedition to Latin America with a French botanist, Aime Bonpland.

For five years, from 1799 to 1804, the two explored over 6,000 miles of Central and South American territory, collecting plant samples, meteorological observations and information on the earth’s geomagnetic field. On his return to Europe, Humboldt remained in Paris to write and publish 30 volumes of information accumulated during the expedition, creating a work that, Wikipedia says, ‘may be regarded as having laid the foundation of the sciences of physical geography and meteorology’.

In 1827, Humboldt returned to Berlin and took up teaching, tutoring the Prussian crown prince and lecturing on physical geography at the university. In 1829, he travelled through Siberia, at the invitation of the Russian government, to visit the gold and platinum mines. The later years of his life were devoted to studying magnetism, and to writing Kosmos. This latter work (five volumes, the last of which appeared posthumously) was focused on physical geography and the natural sciences, and tried to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. He died on 6 May 1859, one and a half centuries ago today.

Humboldt certainly wrote diaries on his travels in Latin America. Ulrike Leitner has a note about them on the University of Potsdam website. She says that in compiling his diary, Humboldt considered ‘all observations worthy of writing down, but his preference for precise measurements [was] especially remarkable’. Humboldt’s diaries, she believes, are ‘the essential source for a full account of his stay in Mexico’ since an unfinished work on his American journey (published in French in three volumes as Relation Historique du Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent) ends with his arrival in Columbia in 1801. She explains that Humboldt referred to his diaries regularly and made them ‘the basis of his publications on the results of the American journey, especially for the Relation Historique’. He later took the diary notebooks apart and had them bound into nine volumes.

Leitner gives one example from Humboldt’s diary, dated August-September 1803: ‘[it was one of the] most exhausting periods of my life. I climbed all mountains using my barometer. In Valenciana I descended three times to the bottom of the mine, two times in Rayas, in Mellado, in Fraustros, in Animas and in San Bruno. I visited the mine of Villalpando, spent two days in Santa Rosa and in Los Álamos [. . .] I had a dangerous fall on my back in Fraustros, and experienced extreme pain for 14 days due to a sprain of the base of my spine!’

Elsewhere on the same university website is a short conference paper brief by Michael Zeuske of the University of Cologne. It focuses on the Diario Habana 1804, Humboldt’s last unpublished diary, and was written during or soon after the Haitian revolution. Zeuske is particularly concerned with Humboldt’s attitude to slavery and some conflicts between the stance he always takes when writing in his diary and the actual relationships he has with slaveholding elites in Cuba and Venezuela.

These references apart, I can find little evidence of Humboldt’s diaries on the internet, and I can find no sign of them ever having been published in English. However, his letters are a different matter. A large collection written to his friend Varnhagen von Ense were published (by Rudd & Carleton, New York) the year after his death with a selection of extracts from Varnhagen’s diary about Humboldt.

A short preface written by Humboldt’s niece, Ludmilla Assing, says: ‘The following letters of Humboldt furnish a contribution of the highest importance to the true, correct, and unveiled representation of his genius and character. That they should be delivered to publicity after his death was his desire and intent, which have found their positive impression in the words preceding this book as its motto. Never has he spoken out his mind more freely and sincerely, than in his communications with Varnhagen, his old and faithful friend, whom he esteemed and loved before all others. . . The interest of Humboldt’s letters is sometimes pleasantly heightened by entries in Varnhagen’s diary - they will indicate the verbal sentiments of Humboldt in addition to those written by him.’

Here are a few of Varnhagen’s diary observations about Humboldt taken from the book - Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense from 1827 to 1858 with extracts from Varnhagen’s Diaries, and Letters of Varnhagen and other to Humboldt - which is freely available at Internet Archive and other websites.

3 May 1837
‘In the evening, at the Princess of Pueckler’s, the long-promised lecture by Herr von Humboldt. The lecture was very fine, and made an excellent impression. I had a conversation with General von Ruhle on Humboldt’s genius. He totally agreed with me, saying, ‘When he shall have died, then only shall we understand well what we have possessed in him.’ ’

19 April 1839
‘I saw Humboldt to-day, who told me many things, and showed me a beautiful portrait of Arago, which pleased me very much. He talked much about the difficulties between Russia and England, as to their interests in the East Indies and in Persia, and repeated what he had heard about it from the Russian Emperor himself. The Czar was in a great passion against the English, and thought it highly important to oppose their supremacy in Asia. Humboldt agrees with me that the English have nothing serious to fear for the next fifty years from Russia in the Indies, but that fear and jealousy may engender a quarrel in Europe prior to any conflict in the East, although conflicting parties will certainly think twice before allowing it to come to that pass.’

9 June 1839
‘Humboldt agrees with me in the assertion made by me at different times, that too much cannot be inferred from the silence of the historians. He refers to three highly important and undeniable facts, which are not mentioned by those whose first duty it should have been to record them. In the archives of Barcelona, no vestige of the triumphal entry held there by Columbus; in Marco Polo, no mention of the Chinese wall; in the archives of Portugal, nothing of the travels of Amerigo Vespucci, in the service of that crown.’

30 April 1841
‘Humboldt has a great many enemies, as well amongst the savans as at court, who are constantly seeking an opportunity to malign him, but the moment he is praised all vituperation ceases for it is all vituperation. It is seldom that anybody is able to maintain it. Some time ago a gentleman said to me, that he did not know what to think of Humboldt, and that he could not come to a conclusion concerning him. I answered: ‘Think always the best of him, believe him always capable of the best action, and you always will be nearest the truth.’ Another said, same day, sneeringly: ‘Humboldt was a great man before he came to Berlin, where he became an ordinary one.’

4 July 1857
‘Yesterday Humboldt spoke of the time when he lived in a house at the side of George’s Garden, and was so assiduous in his magnetic observations that he once stinted himself of sleep for seven successive days and nights in order to examine the state of things every half hour; after that he changed the watch with substitutes. This was in 1807, just fifty years ago. I often saw the little house in which the experiments were made, when I visited Johannes von Mueller, who also lived in a house at the side of the same garden; or Fichte who lived in a garden house in the middle of the garden. When old George, a wealthy distiller, showed the garden to his friends, Humboldt went on to say, he never failed to boast of ‘his learned men’. ‘Here I have the famous Mueller; there is Humboldt, and there is Fichte, but he is only a philosopher, I believe.’

(Postscript: Many of Humboldt’s travel journals can now be found online thanks to edition humboldt digital; and there is also much information about his American travel journals, as well images of various pages, at the Alexander von Humboldt Portal.)

A free black female

‘A beautiful May-day - one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen.’ So wrote Charlotte Grimké - a young African-American woman fond of riding horses - one and half centuries ago today. She would go on to become a well-known anti-slavery campaigner and teacher. Her diary is considered one of the few extant documents detailing the life of a free black female in the north before the civil war.

Charlotte Bridges was born in 1837 into a prominent black Philadelphia family. Her grandfather had been a very successful businessman and a significant voice in the abolitionist movement, and her father and his brother-in-law were also abolitionists and members of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee, an anti-slavery, slave assistance network. Charlotte was sent to school in Salem, Massachusetts, where she was the only non-white student in a cohort of 200. In 1856, she began work as a teacher there, and was the first African-American ever hired. She became a member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, and proved to be an influential activist. Two years later, she contracted TB and returned to Philadelphia, where she wrote poetry while convalescing.

With the coming of the Civil War, Charlotte made her way to St Helena Island, South Carolina, where she became the first black teacher involved in the Sea Islands mission. Though wanting to feel a bond with the islanders, her upbringing and education meant she had more in common with the white abolitionists. She wrote about her time there in essays for the Atlantic Monthly.

In the late 1860s, she worked for the Treasury Department recruiting teachers. In 1878, she married Presbyterian minister Francis J Grimké. They had one daughter who died in infancy. Thereafter, Charlotte helped her husband in his ministry in Washington, organised a women’s missionary group and continued her civil rights efforts. She died in 1914, after many years as an invalid.

Wikipedia has more information on Charlotte’s life, as does the Black Past website. But today, Charlotte is best remembered for her diaries, particularly because they provide important first hand documentation of the life of a black woman in the period. They were first edited (by Ray Allen Billington) and published in the 1950s by Norton, New York. Then, in 1988, Brenda Stevenson edited them for publication by the Oxford University Press as The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (available to preview at Googlebooks).

Here are two extracts I’ve culled from the Stevenson edition - the first is dated May day, exactly 150 years ago.

1 May 1859
‘A beautiful May-day. - One of the loveliest I’ve ever seen. Had a delightful drive through the country to Attleborough. The trees are perfectly beautiful - in full bloom. The grass is green, the birds as mirthful, the sky as cloudless, and the air as warm as in summer. Had a pleasant day at the C.’s delightful place. Am almost as deeply in love with Sallie C. ad G. is. She is a dear, warm-hearted girl! Saw some perfect violets.’

6 May 1859
‘Had a splendid ride of three miles, on horseback, to L.’s greenhouse. Before I reached it the air was laden with the fragrance of mignonette and heliotrope. Within was a scene - beautiful as fairy land - roses verbenas, clematic [sic], all kinds of flowers, in full bloom. One division of the greenhouse was filled with geraniums in bloom - the finest collection I’ve ever seen. My sturdy old horse - “Joe” - came back quite rapidly, and I enjoyed the sunset ride perfectly. No exercise is so thoroughly exhilarating and delighful to me as horseback riding. It makes me feel younger and happier.’

And here are two more extracts taken from a website of resources for teachers hosted by PBS:

5 November 1862
‘Had my first regular teaching experience, and to you and you only friend beloved, will I acknowledge that it was not a very pleasant one.’

13 November 1862
‘Talked to the children a little while to-day about the noble Toussaint [a leader of the Haitian revolution who died in 1803]. They listened very attentively. It is well that they should know what one of their own color could do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage and ambition (of a noble sort), and high purpose.’

The father of NZ geology

Christian Gottlieb Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter, a German geologist famous for his work in the Antipodes, was born 180 years ago today. He was one of the leading scientists appointed for an Austrian expedition to circumnavigate the world in the mid-1850s, and made a particular impression in the Antipodes. Both he and at least one of his colleagues kept diaries during the voyage; some extracts from these are available online and in English thanks to Australian and New Zealand websites.

The son of a clergyman and scientist, Hochstetter was born at Esslingen, Germany, 180 years ago today. He was educated at the evangelical seminary in Maulbronn and at the university of Tübingen where he studied geology. In 1852, he joined the staff of the Imperial Geological Survey of Austria and became chief geologist for Bohemia. He was selected, along with a group of other scientists, to take part in the Novara expedition, starting in 1857, which aimed to circumnavigate the world. After visiting South America, Asia and South Africa, the ship’s captain was encouraged to make a diversion to New Zealand to allow scientific examination of the North Island volcanic regions.

While in New Zealand, in 1859, Hochstetter was chosen to make a geological survey of the islands, and remained behind after the Novara sailed for Europe. He returned to Austria the following year, and was appointed professor of mineralogy and geology at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. The following year he married Georgiana Bengough, the daughter of an Englishman who was director of the Vienna city gasworks. They had four sons and four daughters.

Apart from his teaching work - during which he introduced new teaching practices, built up teaching collections, and led popular fieldwork expeditions - Hochstetter also served as president of the Geographical Society of Vienna from 1866 to 1882. In 1876, he was appointed the first intendant of the Imperial Natural History Museum. Just before his death in 1884, he was granted a hereditary knighthood by the Austrian emperor. Today, he is considered one of the founders of engineering geology. Wikipedia has a short bio, but a more substantial biography can be found in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

Indeed New Zealand remembers Hochstetter fondly - calling him the Father of New Zealand Geology. In 1863 he published Neu-Seeland, the first substantial work about New Zealand to appear in the German language. It contains vivid descriptions of his New Zealand travels, geological observations, and encounters with indigenous communities. An English translation appeared in 1867. (Original copies can be found on Abebooks, but cost several hundreds of pounds.)

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Novara in Auckland in December 1858, the Auckland City Libraries organised an Hochstetter exhibition. An online version of the exhibition - called Ferdinand von Hochstetter: Father of New Zealand Geology - can be accessed via the Libraries website. It includes many photographs, and images of documents and maps. But there are also images of Hochstetter’s diary, the one surviving volume of five he wrote during his time in New Zealand.

Hochstetter is also a bit of a historical hero in Australia. Michael Organ, a one-time Green Australian politician and academic, runs a website with substantial information about the Navara expedition, and the work undertaken by the Austrian scientists - including Hochstetter and his colleague Karl Scherzer  - when visiting New South Wales. This site also includes transcripts of a journal kept by Scherzer, and these mention Hochstetter a number of times. Here are two extracts.

23 November 1858
‘Fancy dress ball given by the citizens of Sydney to the Right Worshipful Mayor & Lady Mayoress to reciprocate the ball recently given by the Mayor (reputedly at a cost of £800). The Commodore and all the officers had been invited to attend, and so I went there at about 9 o’clock. The ball took place in the Prince of Wales Theatre. The company was very mixed, there was pushing and shoving. Very few respectable families. Hill was also there. By chance I was introduced to a certain Dr. Berncastle, a local doctor, who looks and behaves like an adventurer. He claimed to have earned the gratitude of the Expedition because he had shown Dr Hochstetter the shortest route to Bathurst! This gentleman made a terrible fool of himself later on which served him right for his arrogance.’

25 November 1858
‘At 6 o’clock in the evening a dinner was given in the German Club by a number of Germans in honour of the presence of an Imperial Austrian warship. The great dining-room was very elegant and decorated in keeping with the occasion. Perhaps about 40 persons took their seats. The customary toasts concluded proceedings: - the Queen! - The Emperor of Austria! - the members of the Austrian Imperial family! To which the Commodore responded with a toast to Prince Albert. Then: - to the Commodore and the officers of the Novara - responded to by the Commodore with a very pretty toast - to the Germans in Australia, responded to - German Science! - to which I replied with a toast to the unity, might and greatness of our common Fatherland - in which I endeavoured to stress that in recent years no German state had, by fusing material and national economic interests, contributed so much to German unity as the new regenerated Austria! Dr. Hochstetter spoke a few very moving words in memory of Leichhardt [a Prussian explorer who had disappeared earlier that year while in northern Australia, and whose expedition inspired Patrick White’s novel Voss], whereupon all those present rose in silence from their seats. This was followed by toasts to Alexander von Humboldt, Sir William Denison, etc. The festivities closed at 11 p.m.’

Michael Organ also provides the only significant extract from Hochstetter’s diary I can find on the internet. It concerns a visit the Novara made to an island - then called Sikyana, now part of the Soloman Islands - in October 1858, and an alleged incident in which the Novara crew robbed the island’s natives of livestock. Organ provides a learned and referenced essay on the incident. It includes a rebuttal of the accusations made by Hochstetter along with quotes from his diary.

Turkish diary in news coup

Turkish newspapers have reported in the last few days that a former commander of the Turkish armed forces, General Hilmi Özkök, has confirmed the existence of a coup plot in 2004. Allegations about such a coup were first made public in 2007 by a newspaper called Nokta which published extracts allegedly from the diary of Admiral Özden Örnek. Last year, The Diary Junction Blog ran two articles on this story when the editor of Nokta was taken to court for publishing the extracts. At the time, the coup allegations were being completely ignored by the authorities.

In 2007 ( The Diary Review wrote), the newsweekly Nokta (which subsequently closed down) published excerpts from a diary allegedly written by a former navy commander, Özden Örnek. The excerpts gave details of how Turkey narrowly escaped two military coups in 2004. Örnek himself was one of the coup plotters. He denied having written the diary entries and claimed they had been libelously attributed to him. During the course of a legal case against Nokta’s editor-in-chief, Alper Görmü, it was proven by a group of experts that the diaries did originate from Örnek’s computer. Görmü was subsequently acquitted of all charges.

At the time, the English-language newspaper, Today’s Zaman, drew strong conclusions from the case: ‘This acquittal implicitly verified the claims that top-ranking commanders of the army had been involved in attempts to stage coups. However, not even a single investigation has so far been launched against the coup plotters. This incident clearly indicates that even those who attempt stage coups are very well protected. To this day, none of those who have made these attempts have been investigated, despite very clear and open evidence, let alone tried.’

Soon after, however, Turkish prosecutors did begin to look into the alleged coup, referred to as Ergenekon (see Wikipedia), and since then the case has been widely reported in the Turkish newspapers. Yesterday (29 April), Today’s Zaman reported that the prosecutors had secretly traveled to İzmir to take testimony from General Özkök, and the article gave some details:

‘In response to the prosecution’s question, “Have there been any coup plans during your term?” Özkök said, “Most of what has been detailed in the coup diaries is true. However, there are also sections I do not agree with. For example, Örnek has denied that the diaries belonged to him. If a commander is saying that these don't belong to him, I would respect his statement. However, some of the incidents mentioned there have transpired. I have observed myself that some of our friends in the Turkish Armed Forces felt great distrust and worry regarding the government. There was discord over how to express this unease some commanders felt.” ’

St Ogg’s on the Floss

Exactly one and a half centuries ago today, George Eliot was making an entry in her diary about the idea of naming a book St Ogg’s on the Floss. However, by the end of that year, 1859, the title had become The Mill on the Floss. And the novel itself? Well, it was destined to become one of the most loved and enduring of English literary classics.

Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury, Warwickshire, the daughter of a land agent to the Earl of Lonsdale. As a child she was an avid reader. Her mother died when she was still a teenager, and when her father retired in 1841, she went with him to live in Coventry, and kept house. There, she joined a group of intellectuals, including Charles Bray, who were studying the Bible, and became more sceptical about Anglicanism. Her first literary work, Life of Jesus, a translation from German, was published in 1846. After her father’s death in 1849, she travelled on the Continent with the Brays, and moved to London, where she worked as a subeditor for the Westminster Review.

In 1854, she started a relationship with George Henry Lewes, who was married but separated from his wife. They lived together, a situation which caused a social scandal, and travelled abroad on various occasions. Lewes encouraged her to write, and in 1856 she began publishing Scenes of Clerical Life in Blackwood’s Magazine under the pseudonym George Eliot. By 1861, she had published three of her most famous novels: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, although it was to be another ten years before she finished Middlemarch. After Lewes died in 1878, Eliot married John Walter Cross. She died two years later. More biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Victorian Web.

Subsequently, Cross arranged and edited Eliot’s letters and diaries into what he described as her ‘autobiography (if the term may be permitted)’. This was published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1885 (Harper & Brothers in the US) with the title - George Eliot’s Life as related in her Letters and Journals. The original is available for view at Internet Archive, and a reproduction by BiblioBazaar published in 2008 is partly viewable on Googlebooks. In 2000, Cambridge University Press released an edition of all Eliot’s surviving diaries. It includes, the publisher says, a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information. A few pages can be viewed on Amazon. More links concerning Eliot and her diaries can be found at The Diary Junction.

Here are a few diary/letter extracts from the 1885 edition of George Eliot’s Life as related in her Letters and Journals. They all concern one of Eliot’s most famous books, and the first is dated exactly 150 years ago today.

29 April 1859
‘Finished a story - The Lifted Veil - which I began one morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work. Resumed my new novel, of which I am going to rewrite the two first chapters. I shall call it provisionally The Tullivers, for the sake of a title quelconque, or perhaps St Ogg’s on the Floss.’

15 December 1859
‘Blackwood proposes to give me for The Mill on the Floss £2000 for 4000 copies of an edition at 31s. 6d. and after the same rate for any more that may be printed at the same price: £150 for 1000 at 12s.; and £60 for 1000 at 6s. I have accepted.’

3 January 1860 - Letter to John Blackwood
‘We are demurring about the title. Mr Lewes is beginning to prefer The House of Tulliver; or Life on the Floss, to our old notion of Sister Maggie. The Tullivers; or Life on the Floss, has the advantage of slipping easily off the lazy English tongue, but it is after too common a fashion (The Newcomes, The Bertrams,’ &c., &c.) Then there is The Tulliver Family; or, Life on the Floss. Pray meditate and give us your opinion.’

6 January 1860 - Letter to John Blackwood
‘The Mill on the Floss be it then! The only objections are, that the mill is not strictly on the Floss, being on its small tributary, and that the title is of rather laborious utterance. But I think these objections do not deprive it of its advantage of The Tullivers; or Life on the Floss - the only alternative, so far as we can see. Pray do give the casting-vote.’

Aurora Quezon’s bomb fuse

It is 60 years to the day that Aurora Quezon, the First Lady of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944, was assassinated en route to open a hospital dedicated to her husband, Manuel Quezon, the country’s first nationally-elected president, who had died of TB five years earlier. And this anniversary seems as good a reason as any to draw attention to The Philippine Diary Project, a freely accessible website with interesting historical material, not least about Aurora.

Wikipedia has a good biography of Aurora Quezon, as does a website run by Manuel L. Quezon III. She was born in 1888, in Baler Province (part of which was renamed Aurora Province in her honour). During the Philippine Revolution, which lasted until 1898, her father was imprisoned by the Spanish, and for a while she was taken in, and taught, by her aunt, Maria Dolores Molina, the mother of her future husband.

In 1911, she went to Manila to study teaching but suffered from poor health. Then, in 1918, she married her first cousin Manuel Luis Quezon. He had become the first President of the Philippine Senate two years earlier, and would remain in that position until 1935 when he was elected President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Aurora, meanwhile, involved herself with women’s organizations, such as the girl scouts, and was active in the campaign to give women the right to vote (achieved in 1937).

President Quezon was re-elected in November 1941, but the country was immediately beset with a crisis when Japan invaded the following month. The first couple evacuated, first to Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay, and then, in February, out of the country, making a long journey and only reaching the US in June. Manuel Quezon died of tuberculosis in 1944. Thereafter, Aurora moved to California for a year or so before returning to the Philippines in 1945. There she campaigned actively for Manuel Roxas, who became the first president of an independent Philippine Republic, and she helped launch and run the Philippine National Red Cross.

On 28 April 1949, 60 years ago today, Aurora Quezon was on her way to Baler to inaugurate the Quezon Memorial Hospital. She was travelling with her eldest daughter, Maria Aurora, and her son-in-law, Felipe Buencamino III, in a convoy of 13 vehicles. As they travelled along a mountain road, they were attacked by a group of armed men. All three of them were killed, along with another nine in the party, and ten of the assailants. It was widely believed that the Hukbalahap - the military arm of the Philippines communist party - were responsible. Wikipedia notes that while no Philippine President has ever been assassinated, Aurora Quezon is one of three presidential spouses to have been murdered.

When I first put Aurora Quezon’s name into Google looking for a diary connection, I really didn’t expect to find one. But The Philippine Diary Project emerged very quickly. I think it was set up by Manuel L. Quezon III about a year ago, although this information doesn’t seem to be available on the site itself. The aim of the site is ‘to make diaries of prominent individuals from Philippine history available to the general reader’. About 12 diarists feature on the site at present, some from unpublished works, and some from editions that were either limited, or are no longer in print. As much as possible, the site author says, the diaries are ‘either in the public domain or permission has been given to reproduce them here’.

Here are three entries on the website about Aurora Quezon, all taken from January 1942, just after the start of the Japanese invasion, when she and her husband were on the island of Corregidor. Two are taken from the diary of Felipe Buencamino III, and one from the diary of Diary of General Basilio Valdes, chief of staff of the Philippine Army during the war.

2 January 1942 - Diary of General Basilio Valdes
‘After luncheon the President, Mrs. Quezon and their children were seated in the hospital tunnel [Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor], between laterals 11 & 9 where we were lodged. Two bombs fell on the hill on top of the tunnel, one of them near the main entrance. The whole mountain shook. Suddenly a terrific explosion was heard. A bomb had fallen 20 yards from the kitchen exit of the hospital tunnel. The lights were extinguished as a bomb had hit a generator. As the noise of the explosion was heard, simultaneously with the extinguishing of the lights, someone ordered aloud “everybody lie on the floor”. I did not do it as I thought it was absurd and ridiculous. I went to lateral 11 to get my flashlight from my bed and when I entered it I found the High Commissioner, Mrs. Sayre and his assistants lying on the cement floor. Someone turned on a flashlight. I saw the President, holding Mrs. Quezon moving towards his bed. There they sat. I took my flashlight and rushed back to the main hospital tunnel to see if someone else was been hurt. No one - Thank God! I sat down and waited.’

8 January 1942 - Diary of Philip Buencamino III
‘Malinta Tunnel. I don’t like this place. Yes, it’s safer and bombproof but the air is damp and stuffy. Give me the cool mountain breezes and the starlit skies of Bataan anytime. . . Corregidor is a wreck. The docks have been bombed and rebombed. The chapel is partially destroyed and nothing remains but the cross and the altar. . .

Mrs. Quezon brought me to President Quezon. The President was wearing a white shirt and white riding pants, a striking contrast to the khaki of the soldiers in the Rock. He was carrying a short whip. He looked thin but smart and snappy. The President said that he was glad to see me fighting for my country. He said: “I was in Bataan too during the revolution as an aide to Gen. Mascardo. I know every nook and corner of that place. I got malaria there too.” . . .

At about noontime, I walked with Nini to the hospital lateral. Then suddenly the lights went out. The tunnel walls began to shake. Japs were dropping 1000 pounders. Air inside tunnel was pressing against the lungs. More bombs dropped. Detonation reverberates louder in tunnel than outside. Nurses started mumbling prayers. Salvos of AA guns shook cement under our feet. Then I saw a flashlight. It was Mrs. Quezon. She was looking for her children. Nini said: “We are here mama.” Mrs. Quezon was afraid Nini and Baby were out in the open and felt relieved. There we were - Mrs. Quezon, Nini and I - cramped between soldiers and laborers who rushed inside the tunnel when the raid started. It was the equality of war. Then came the parade of the wounded. Filipino soldiers were rushed in on stretchers. There were cries of pain. Many were unconscious. I saw Fr. Ortiz giving blessings, hearing last minute confessions. He was here, there, everywhere. I saw an American whose leg was covered with blood being rushed to the medical department. Gen. Valdes who is an expert surgeon was busy assisting the wounded. The raid continued. I tried to remain cool even as the tunnel shook with the detonation of bombs and the firing of AA guns, but inside I was getting afraid. I kept telling myself it is safer in the tunnel, not like in Bataan. But I guess fear is contagious and there something about the tunnel that makes one feel asphyxiated. . .’

21 January 1942 - Diary of Philip Buencamino III
‘Mrs. Quezon is slightly thinner. She says she cannot sleep well at night because her son who sleeps in the upper deck of her bed “moves too much.”

Mrs. Quezon showed great concern over hardships suffered by boys in Bataan. She said she was proud of the great stories of heroism of Filipino troops in Bataan. “The whole world,” she said “is talking about it.”

The President’s wife showed me the fuse of the first bomb dropped by Japs in Baguio on Dec. 8, 1941. “I’m keeping this,” she said in her slow, calm manner, “because this is historical.”

She said she was in Baguio when Japs first bombed Philippines. “We thought the planes flying were U.S.,” she said.

Mrs. Quezon told me to send some of our operatives to Arayat to find out what has happened to her farm. I said there were men in Arayat now looking into the matter.

Mrs. Quezon recounted how she and her family went to Corregidor, how they crossed Manila Bay and how an air-raid signal was sounded in the City when their boat left Manila.

She told me to see her before I leave for Bataan because she had some canned stuff for me.

Mrs. Quezon spends her time in the Rock reading, sewing, visiting some of the sick and praying. I think she prays most of the time. She is a very holy woman.’

A labile equilibrium

Following on from Friday’s article, it’s also 120 years since the birth of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian born but one of the most influential figures in British philosophy during the 20th century. He was a bit of a diarist too, with a penchant for coded entries about his private life as well as somewhat existential musings, such as ‘I feel as if my intellect was in a very labile equilibrium.’

The youngest of eight children, Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889, and raised in a rich and intellectual Viennese family. He studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, but became interested in the foundations of mathematics and pursued philosophical studies with Bertrand Russell and G E Moore at Cambridge. Wittgenstein’s father died in 1913, leaving Wittgenstein independently very wealthy, although he donated some of his inheritance to Austrian artists and writers.

With the onset of war, he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, and saw action on the Russian front and in Italy, where he was taken as a prisoner of war in November 1918. As a soldier he had kept notebooks and these became the basis for Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book-length treatise on his picture theory of language which, while still an Italian prisoner, he managed to write and send to Russell in Cambridge. It was not published until 1921, but nevertheless became and remains one of the most important philosophical works of the period.

After the war, Wittgenstein gave away the rest of his fortune to his siblings. According to Wikipedia’s long and detailed biography, he felt that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them further, whereas the rich would not be harmed by it. Having denounced any further need to work on philosophy and having embraced Christianity, he trained as a teacher in Austria, and spent some years working in a village school. Eventually, though, the pull of philosophy, through the Vienna Circle especially which had been so influenced by Tractatus, took him back to Cambridge in 1929.

Thereafter, he developed the idea that there is nothing wrong with ordinary language as it stands, and that many traditional philosophical problems were only illusions brought on by misunderstandings about language and related subjects, thus helping to inspire a second philosophical movement. In 1939, he was appointed chair of philosophy at Cambridge, a position he held until resigning in 1947, although during the war he volunteered as a hospital porter and laboratory assistant. But Wittgenstein was always restless, moving to Norway, or Russia, or Ireland or back to Austria at different times, for different reasons. He died in 1951

Wittgenstein’s diary output appears to have been collated into two parts: the notebooks he wrote during the First World War, and the so-called Koder Diaries from the 1930s. Some information about the former can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, and published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003. Some pages are freely available to view on Googlebooks.

It states: ‘On August 8, 1914, Wittgenstein began keeping a diary. On that day he traded a larger manuscript volume for a military uniform, anxiously asking himself whether he would still be able to work. A week later, he suddenly started writing in an illegible code, and yet another week later Wittgenstein divided his diary in two: On left pages he recorded private matters in his secret code, while the pages on the right contained philosophical remarks in normal script.’

These diaries, a footnote explains, were published in two entirely different books: Notebooks of 1914-1916 providing the immediate philosophical background to Tractatus (peak inside at Amazon); and an ‘unauthorised publication’ of the coded entries in Geheime Tagebücher, which ‘arguably offers glimpses of a larger private and spiritual background’.

The Koder diaries, written in the 1930s in Cambridge and Norway, were first edited by Ilse Somavilla and published in 1997 under the title Denkbewegungen or Movements of Thought. The book mentioned above - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions - is, in fact, mostly about these diaries.

A slightly earlier book - Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy edited by Klagge and published by Cambridge University Press in 2001 - has an essay by Nordmann entitled The Sleepy Philosopher: How to Read Wittgenstein’s Diaries. A good review of the book, by Juliet Floyd, can be found on the website of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. She says: ‘Alfred Nordmann’s thoughtful essay warns against the naïve use of Wittgenstein’s diaries as a kind of magical key to the unlocking of his thought, while arguing that the kind of spiritual exercises Wittgenstein works through in them exemplify his philosophical methods.’

She also compares the two sets of diaries: ‘His diaries from the First World War were composed in unbelievably dire, existentially limiting conditions, surrounded by death and killing. The diaries from the 1930’s were composed in crises years, years during which Wittgenstein turned forty, decided not to marry, emigrated, faced the impact of his decision to earn a philosophical living by his own hand, meditated on his Jewishness, reacted to the reception of his early work, . . and tried to come to terms with his own internal philosophical drive, struggling to clarify and make habitable the philosophical place he had reached by the end of the First World War.’

Here are two quotes from Wittgenstein’s diary embedded in Nordmann’s essay in Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy (partly viewable on Googlebooks):

‘At the end of October or early November 1931 Wittgenstein notes: “I can lie like that - or also like that - or best of all, by telling the truth quite sincerely. So I often say to myself.”

Indeed, throughout these diaries Wittgenstein is worried that he might be lying even when saying the truth. It is as if he first allows a thought to occur, then judges whether he has caught himself in a moment of self-deception or self-revelation. As an attempt to write his life or to attain self-knowledge, the diaries are therefore characterised by editorial comments, as are his manuscripts and typescripts.

“Everything or nearly everything I do, these entries included, is tinted by vanity & the best I can do is as it were to separate, to isolate the vanity & do the right thing in spite of it even though it is always watching. I cannot chase it away. Only sometimes is it not present.” ’

Another essay in the same book includes this quote.

31 January 1937
‘I feel as if my intellect was in a very labile equilibrium: so as if a comparatively minor jolt could bring it to snap over. It is like when one sometimes feels close to crying, feels the approaching crying fit. One should then try to breath quite calmly, regularly, deeply until the fity dissipates.’

The Marxist Stafford Cripps

It’s 120 years since the birth of Stafford Cripps, a controversial politician of the far left who became so popular during the Second World War that some thought he might even replace Churchill. His diaries and letters were only released in the 1990s, and those relating to his period as ambassador in Moscow have been published - though not to much acclaim.

Cripps was born in London on 24 April 1889, exactly 120 years ago today. His father was a Member of Parliament (later to become Lord Parmoor), and his mother was the sister of Beatrice Webb (a sociologist and reformer, but also a diarist of some note). Cripps studied at Winchester College and did chemistry at the University of London; later, though, he turned to the law and was called to the bar as a barrister in 1912. During the First World War, he served as an ambulance driver in France and managed a factory producing armaments. After the war, he returned to the law, specialising in patent and compensation cases.

By 1931, Cripps had joined the Labour Party, been appointed Solicitor General, and been elected to Parliament. But his political views moved to the far left, and he soon became an outspoken proponent of Marxist policies. In 1932 he helped found the Socialist League, although five years later he dissolved it rather than face expulsion from the party (Tribune, originally its mouthpiece, however, survives to this day as a respected journal). After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Cripps campaigned, alongside the Communist Party, for the formation of a Popular Front to prevent the spread of fascism, but his views eventually lead to him being expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 (along with Aneurin Bevan).

When Churchill formed his coalition government in 1940, Cripps was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union. He remained in Moscow for nearly two years, and then, on returning to England, he found his views on Russia strikingly popular, so much so that at one point he was considered a potential rival to Churchill, even without party backing. Churchill appointed him Lord Privy Seal and brought him into the War Cabinet. He didn’t stay long, though, and ended the war as Minister of Aircraft Production.

On Cripps’s removal from the War Cabinet, the Spartacus website notes, Hugh Dalton, a Labour Party politician and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, recorded in his diary: ‘He has, I think, been very skilfully played by the PM. He may, of course, be quite good at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, but seldom has anyone’s political stock, having been so outrageously and unjustifiably overvalued, fallen so fast and so far.’

After the war, Cripps’s political views mellowed sufficiently for him to be brought back into the Labour Party and the government. In 1945 Attlee appointed him Minister of Trade, and two years later he replaced Dalton as Chancellor of the Exchequer where his harsh policies helped the country recover from its economic crisis. He resigned in 1950 suffering from ill health, and died in 1952. Considerably more detail about Cripps’s political life can be found on Wikipedia (and the International Vegetarian Union website also has information about Cripps, but focused mainly on his vegetarianism and ill health).

Cripps’s diaries and letters were not released for a long time, not until the 1990s, and Peter Clarke’s biography - The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps - published by Allen Lane in 2002, was the first to make use of them. Then, in 2007, Vallentine Mitchell published Stafford Cripps in Moscow 1940-1942: Diaries and Papers edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky. The publisher says the diary not only describes the metamorphosis in Cripps’s political fortune, but bears witness to the dramatic turnabouts of the war and ‘offers candid glimpses of diplomatic life in Moscow’.

An advertisement on the Cummings Centre website explains that the documents selected and annotated by Gorodetsky (a director of the Cummings Centre) are based in the first place on diary-letters written by Cripps while in Moscow (unveiled for the first time), as well on other documents such as excerpts from Lady Cripps’s diary, and a diary which Cripps kept of his fact-finding tour to the Far East and Moscow in winter 1939-40.

I cannot find any news reviews of the book online, but Christian Schlect says this on Amazon.com: ‘The real trouble with this book is that Cripps was a writer with few gifts and no sense of flare. He did not lower himself to make the interesting observation or aside about either people or his surroundings. Cripps complained incessantly about being unappreciated by headquarters. He was obsessed with a post-war world before the actual war being fought was near being won. And, he was the type of man who was easier on Stalin than on Churchill.’