Siberian driftwood cannot lie

The great Norwegian explorer, oceanographer and international diplomat, Fridtjof Nansen, died 80 years ago today. One of his many important achievements was to envisage the possibility of, and then lead an expedition towards, the North Pole by sailing a specially-designed ship - Fram - into pack ice and letting the natural currents drift her in the ice towards the Pole. Nansen’s record of the Fram expedition, based largely on his diaries, have become a classic of the genre, and are still in print. The original two volumes, however, are freely available on the internet.

Nansen was born near Oslo in 1861 into a prosperous family. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was keen on encouraging her children toward outdoor pursuits. At school, Nansen excelled at sciences as well as at sports such as skating and skiing. In 1882, he joined a sealer for a trip of several months to Greenland. He studied zoology at the University of Oslo, starting in 1881, but also worked during the period as zoological curator at the Bergen Museum. In 1888 he enacted a plan, first envisaged after the sealer trip, to ski across Greenland’s ice cap. The key to his success in this venture, he said, was to have decided to cross from the uninhabited east to the inhabited west, so there would be no possibility of retreat.

In 1889, Nansen married the accomplished singer Eva Sars, and they were to have five children, though Eva was to die tragically young, of pneumonia in 1907. In the next few years, Nansen served as curator of the Zootomical Institute at the University of Oslo, published two books - The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life (1891) - and planned a new expedition into the Arctic, this time based on an audacious plan to reach the North Pole by building a ship that would be carried, not crushed, by the winter freezing and movement of ice in the polar sea.

The Fram (Forward in English) was sailed into the ice pack off Siberia in September 1893, and then began the expected long slow drift. However, in March 1895, after 18 months, and once it was clear that the Fram would continue to drift safely but no closer to the Pole, Nansen and one colleague, F H Johansen, left the ship for an attempt on the Pole. Using dogsleds, they travelled for 23 days, and got closer than anyone had before, but then they turned back, southwest to Franz Josef Land. There they spent the 1895-1896 winter, living in a stone hut roofed with walrus skins, and eating polar bear and walrus meat. They started south again in May, and were reunited with the crew of the Fram in August 21 at Tromsø. Wikipedia has a long and detailed article about the expedition.

Professor James S Aber of Emporia State University makes this assessment of Nansen’s methods in Arctic exploration: ‘Previous expeditions had attempted to transfer temperate European technique into a hostile environment without success. Many men and ships were destroyed, lost, or killed by such tactics. Nansen’s expeditions, on the other hand, involved small crews and carefully conceived methods based on Eskimo and Lapp techniques of survival. In all of Nansen’s exploits, not a single person, major piece of equipment, or important scientific observation was lost. No other person or exploration program, before or since, can claim such an outstanding record for success and safety under such adverse conditions.’

The Fram voyage was Nansen’s final expedition, but it was to provide him with plenty of work and a good income in the years to come. He wrote an account of the voyage based on his diaries, which was translated into English and published in two volumes already in 1897, and he compiled six volumes of scientific observations. Although, after the Fram expedition, he was given a professorship of zoology at the University of Oslo, his interests shifted towards oceanography and he was appointed professor of oceanography instead, leading to important research on the behaviour and origin of ocean currents.

Despite his passion for scientific research, Nansen found himself increasingly preoccupied with political and international issues. In 1905, he supported the independence of Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as his country’s minister to Great Britain until May 1908. During the First World War, he served as head of the Norwegian commission to the US. After the war, there were some attempts to make him prime minister, in a broad coalition against a strengthening Labour Party. But, according to Wikipedia, the rejection of this attempt to establish a Nansen government also marked Norway’s final transition into the parliamentary system.

When the League of Nations started in 1920, he was Norway’s delegate and remained so till his death. For the League, he organised the repatriating of nearly half a million prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia; and he administered its High Commission for Refugees. For the Red Cross, he directed relief aid for millions of Russians suffering in the 1921-1922 famine. He also directed major efforts by the League to solve the problem of Greek refugees and to resettle survivors of the Armenian genocide. In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He died on 13 May 1930, eighty years ago today. Apart from Wikipedia, there is plenty of biographical information about Nansen available on the internet, not least at the website of the Nobel Prize or the Fram Museum.

Nansen’s record of the Fram expedition has become something of an explorer’s classic with many editions since the original two volumes were published by Archibald Constable and Co in London and Harper & Brothers in New York in 1897. In English the book was called Farthest North with the subtitle Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893-1896 and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr Nansen and Lieut. Johansen. There is no acknowledgement of a translator, but there are many photographs and sketches. Both volumes are freely available at Internet Archive.

Here are several consecutive entries from early in 1894. In them, Nansen not only gives a good summary of the expedition so far, but waxes lyrical about his daughter and the stars, gets all philosophical, and mulls over the idea of leaving the Fram and trying to sledge to the Pole (more than a year before he actually does so).

4 January 1894.
‘It seems as if the twilight were increasing quite perceptibly now, but this is very possibly only imagination. I am in good spirits in spite of the fact that we are drifting south again. After all, what does it matter? Perhaps the gain to science will be as great, and, after all, I suppose this desire to reach the North Pole is only a piece of vanity. I have now a very good idea of what it must be like up there. (‘I like that!’ say you.) Our deep water here is connected with, is a part of, the deep water of the Atlantic Ocean - of this there can be no doubt. And have not I found that things go exactly as I calculated they would whenever we get a favorable wind? Have not many before us had to wait for wind? And as to vanity - that is a child’s disease, got over long ago. All calculations, with but one exception, have proved correct. We made our way along the coast of Asia, which many prophesied we should have great difficulty in doing. We were able to sail farther north than I had dared to hope for in my boldest moments, and in just the longitude I wished. We are closed in by the ice, also as I wished. The Fram has borne the ice-pressure splendidly, and allows herself to be lifted by it without so much as creaking, in spite of being more heavily loaded with coal, and drawing more water than we reckoned on when we made our calculations; and this after her certain destruction and ours was prophesied by those most experienced in such matters. I have not found the ice higher nor heavier than I expected it to be; and the comfort, warmth, and good ventilation on board are far beyond my expectations. Nothing is wanting in our equipment, and the food is quite exceptionally good. As Blessing and I agreed a few days ago, it is as good as at home; there is not a thing we long for; not even the thought of a beefsteak a la Chateaubriand, or a pork cutlet with mushrooms and a bottle of Burgundy, can make our mouths water; we simply don’t care about such things. The preparations for the expedition cost me several years of precious life; but now I do not grudge them: my object is attained. On the drifting ice we live a winter life, not only in every respect better than that of previous expeditions, but actually as if we had brought a bit of Norway, of Europe, with us. We are as well off as if we were at home. All together in one saloon, with everything in common, we are a little part of the fatherland, and daily we draw closer and closer together. In one point only have my calculations proved incorrect, but unfortunately in one of the most important. I pre-supposed a shallow Polar Sea, the geatest depth known in these regions up till now being 80 fathoms, found by the Jeannette. I reasoned that all currents would have a strong influence in the shallow Polar Sea, and that on the Asiatic side the current of the Siberian rivers would be strong enough to drive the ice a good way north. But here I already find a depth which we cannot measure with all our line, a depth of certainly 1,000 fathoms, and possibly double that. This at once upsets all faith in the operation of a current; we find either none, or an extremely slight one; my only trust now is in the winds. Columbus discovered America by means of a mistaken calculation, and even that not his own; heaven only knows where my mistake will lead us. Only I repeat once more - the Siberian driftwood on the coast of Greenland cannot lie, and the way it went we must go.’

8 January 1894
‘Little Liv [Nansen’s daughter] is a year old today; it will be a fete day at home. As I was lying on the sofa reading after dinner, Peter put his head in at the door and asked me to come up and look at a strange star which had just shown itself above the horizon, shining like a beacon flame. I got quite a start when I came on deck and saw a strong red light just above the edge of the ice in the south. It twinkled and changed color; it looked just as if some one were coming carrying a lantern over the ice; I actually believe that for a moment I so far forgot our surroundings as to think that it really was some person approaching from the south. It was Venus, which we see to-day for the first time, as it has till now been beneath the horizon. It is beautiful with its red light. Curious that it should happen to come to-day. It must be Liv’s star, as Jupiter is the home star. And Liv’s birthday is a lucky day - we are on our way north again. According to observations we are certainly north of 79° north latitude. On the home day, September 6th, the favorable wind began to blow that carried us along the coast of Asia; perhaps Liv’s day has brought us into a good current, and we are making the real start for the north under her star.’

12 January 1894
‘There was pressure about 10 o’clock this morning in the opening forward, but I could see no movement when I was there a little later. I followed the opening some way to the north. It is pretty cold work walking with the thermometer at 40° F below zero, and the wind blowing with a velocitv of 16 feet per second straight in your face. But now we are certainly drifting fast to the north under Liv’s star. After all, it is not quite indifferent to me whether we are going north or south. When the drift is northward new life seems to come into me, and hope, the ever young, springs fresh and green from under the winter snow. I see the way open before me, and I see the home-coming in the distance - too great happiness to believe in.’

14 January 1894
‘Sunday again. . . Yesterday the ice was quiet, but this morning there was considerable pressure in several places. Goodness knows what is causing it just now; it is a whole week after new moon. I took a long walk to the southwest, and got right in among it. Packing began where I stood, with roars and thunders below me and on every side. I jumped, and ran like a hare, as if I had never heard such a thing before; it came so unexpectedly. The ice was curiously fiat there to the south; the farther I went the flatter it grew, with excellent sledging surface. Over such ice one could drive many miles a day.’

15 January 1894
‘There was pressure forward both this morning and towards noon, but we heard the loudest sounds from the north. Sverdrup, Mogstad, and Peter went in that direction and were stopped by a large, open channel. Peter and I afterwards walked a long distance N.N.E., past a large opening that I had skirted before Christmas. It was shining, flat ice, splendid for sledging on, always better the farther north we went. The longer I wander about and see this sort of ice in all directions, the more strongly does a plan take hold of me that I have long had in my mind. It would be possible to get with dogs and sledges over this ice to the Pole, if one left the ship for good and made one’s way back in the direction of Franz Josef Land, Spitzbergen, or the west coast of Greenland. It might almost be called an easy expedition for two men.

But it would be too hasty to go off in spring. We must first see what kind of drift the summer brings. And as I think over it, I feel doubtful if it would be right to go off and leave the others. Imagine if I came home and they did not! Yet it was to explore the unknown polar regions that I came; it was for that the Norwegian people gave their money; and surely my first duty is to do that if I can. I must give the drift plan a longer trial yet; but if it takes us in a wrong direction, then there is nothing for it but to try the other, come what may.’

16 January 1894
‘The ice is quiet to-day. Does longing stupefy one, or does it wear itself out and turn at last into stolidity? Oh that burning longing night and day were happiness! But now its fire has turned to ice. Why does home seem so far away? It is one’s all; life without it is so empty, so empty - nothing but dead emptiness. Is it the restlessness of spring that is beginning to come over one, the desire for action, for something different from this indolent, enervating life? Is the soul of man nothing but a succession of moods and feelings, shifting as incalculably as the changing winds? Perhaps my brain is over-tired; day and night my thoughts have turned on the one point, the possibility of reaching the Pole and getting home. Perhaps it is rest I need - to sleep, sleep! Am I afraid of venturing my life? No, it cannot be that. But what else, then, can be keeping me back? Perhaps a secret doubt of the practicability of the plan. My mind is confused; the whole thing has got into a tangle; I am a riddle to myself. I am worn out, and yet I do not feel any special tiredness. Is it perhaps because I sat up reading last night? Everything around is emptiness, and my brain is a blank. I look at the home pictures and am moved by them in a curious, dull way; I look into the future, and feel as if it does not much matter to me whether I get home in the autumn of this year or next. So long as I get home in the end, a year or two seem almost nothing. I have never thought this before. I have no inclination to read, nor to draw, nor to do anything else whatever. Folly! Shall I try a few pages of Schopenhauer? No, I will go to bed, though I am not sleepy. Perhaps, if the truth were known, I am longing now more than ever. The only thing that helps me is writing, trying to express myself on these pages, and then looking at myself, as it were, from the outside. Yes, man’s life is nothing but a succession of moods, half memory and half hope.’

Ricci the sinologist

Matteo Ricci, a pioneering Italian sinologist, died four hundred years ago today. He was one of the first Jesuit missionaries to be allowed into China, and never returned to Europe. He wrote several important books in Chinese and composed a now famous map of the world. However, his most important legacy, at least in the West, may be the manuscript he wrote in Italian, which was translated soon after into Latin, but not into English until more than 300 years later: China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci.

Matteo (or Matthew in English) Ricci was born in 1552 of a noble family in Macerata, then part of the Papal States but today a city in central Italy, 130 km east of Perugia. Aged 16, he went to Rome to study law but soon decided on joining the Jesuits. The Jesuits had only been given Papal legitimacy some 30 years earlier, but were already making a name for themselves in scientific research and with voyages to the New World.

In 1577, Ricci set out for Lisbon where he continued his studies while waiting for a ship to the East. He arrived in Goa in 1578, and stayed on the west coast of India for several years (he was ordained in Cochin in 1580) before being ordered to China in 1582. Once in the Portuguese province of Macau, Ricci started learning the Chinese language and Chinese customs - the Jesuits having recently decided on a strategy of adopting local customs.

In 1583, Ricci and Michele Ruggieri, another Jesuit priest now considered to be the first European sinologist, were given permission to settle in Zhaoqing, then the capital of Kwangtun province. Within the next few years, Ruggieri is credited with publishing the first Catholic catechism in Chinese, and Ricci is credited with producing the first edition of his Map of the Myriad Countries of the World, sometimes now called The Black Tulip of Cartography, because of its rarity, importance and exoticism. Together, Ricci and Ruggieri are also credited with compiling a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, for which they developed a consistent system of transcribing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet.

Ruggieri returned to Italy in 1588, leaving Ricci in charge of the Jesuit mission in China. He was expelled from Zhaoqing in 1589, but relocated in Shaoguan. Further travels took him to Nanchang (1595-1598), where he became a friend of two princes of royal blood and wrote his first book in Chinese (On Friendship), and to Nanking (1599-1601) where he was engaged mostly in the study of astronomy and mathematics. In 1601, he won permission to settle in Beijing, where he remained until his death on 11 May 1610 - exactly 400 years ago today - teaching science, preaching the gospel, and writing several more books in Chinese. For further biographical information see Wikipedia, the Catholic Encyclopaedia, or Prof Joseph MacDonnell’s website at Fairfield University.

However, Ricci’s most important and enduring book, written in Italian, was based on his journals and entitled De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu (About Christian expeditions to China undertaken by the Society of Jesus). It was expanded and translated into Latin by Nicolas Trigault, and first published in 1615. A well-referenced Wikipedia article provides good details of the book’s history. It explains that excerpts first appeared in English in Purchas his Pilgrimes in 1625, but a complete English translation of the Latin text (by the Jesuit Louis J Gallagher) was not published until 1942. It was reprinted by Random House ten years later as China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci.

At the time, Kenneth Roxroth, writing in The New Republic, said: ‘It is not often that a classic, previously unknown to the world at large, appears on the book market. The only other example I can think of nowadays is the publication of the Boswell manuscripts. Matteo Ricci was of course a much greater man and occupied a much more important place in history, and was at least as interesting a writer. I am inclined to agree with the publishers that this is one of the most important books they have ever issued.’ (This review can be found online at the Bureau of Public Secrets.)

A little more from that review: ‘The best sinologists were the early Jesuits, and their Latin translations of the Chinese classics are still at least the equal of anything produced in the succeeding 300 years. They completely merged themselves with the Chinese; in fact they became Chinese literati, with considerable personal influence on the Emperor. They introduced Western science and philosophy to the Orient and Chinese culture to the Occident with such success that the eighteenth century was the century of chinoiserie. Even the Chinese Communists still respect Ricci as the greatest and least predatory of the culture-bearers from the West.’

Here are two extracts from the book (although not in diary form) as found in a pdf available on the Columbia Centre for Teaching and Learning website

‘The Chinese can distinguish between their magistrates by the parasols they use as protection against the sun when they go out in public. Some of these are blue and others yellow. Sometimes for effect they will have two or three of these sunshades, but only one if their rank does not permit of more. They may also be recognized by their mode of transportation in public. The lower ranks ride on horseback, the higher are carried about on the shoulders of their servants in gestatorial chairs. The number of carriers also has significance of rank; some are only allowed four, others may have eight. There are other ways also of distinguishing the magistracy and the rank of dignity therein; by banners and pennants, chains and censer cups, and by the number of guards who give orders to make way for the passage of the dignitary. The escort itself is held in such high esteem by the public that no one would question their orders. Even in crowded city everyone gives way at the sound of their voices with a spontaneity that correspond to the rank of the approaching celebrity. . .’

‘Another remarkable fact and quite worthy of note as marking a difference from the West, is that the entire kingdom is administered by the Order of the Learned, commonly known as The Philosophers. The responsibility for the orderly management of the entire realm is wholly and completely committed to their charge and care. The army, both officers and soldiers, hold them in high respect and show them the promptest obedience and deference, and not infrequently the military are disciplined by them as a schoolboy might be punished by his master. Policies of war are formulated and military; questions are decided by the Philosophers only, and their advice and counsel has more weight with the King than that of the military leaders. In fact very few of these and only on rare occasions, are admitted to war consultations. Hence it follows that those who aspire to be cultured frown upon war and would prefer the lowest rank in the philosophical order to the highest in the military, realizing that the Philosophers far excel military leaders in the good will and the respect of the people and in opportunities of acquiring wealth.’

The Hertfordshire Pepys

Two hundred years ago today, John Carrington - a farmer and man of many talents who was also dubbed the Hertfordshire Pepys - was writing the very last entry in his diary. A few days later he would be dead.

There is very little biographical information about Carrington on the internet. He was born in 1726, and owned Bacons Farm in Bramfield, Hertfordshire. At some time in his life he was also chief constable for a number of scattered parishes, as well as a tax collector and upkeeper of the highways. Otherwise, it is also known that he was a frequent visitor of the Rose and Crown at Tewin, a pub kept by his son Jack between 1791 and 1820. He died in 1810, and, it is said, a thousand people attended his funeral.

Carrington began writing a diary in the year after his wife’s death, when he was already 71 years old, and continued until a few weeks before his death. The manuscripts are held by Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies in a collection entitled ‘Diaries of John Carrington, senior and junior farmers, of Bacons Farm, Bramfield, and associated papers, c1780-1948’.

The National Archives website explains how the diary of John Carrington senior was first published as Good Friends and Merry by W Branch Johnson, and serialised by The Welwyn Times in 1947-1948. Initially, the book was edited by Johnson on the basis of a transcript of the diaries (dating from the late 19th or early 20th century), but, when the originals were deposited in the record office, he used them to check the transcript. Subsequently, the same version was published as The Carrington Diaries, and then later, in 1969, by Hertfordshire Countryside as The Hertfordshire Pepys.

One of the original pages of Carrington’s diaries can be viewed at the Herts Memories website, as can lots of extracts (with audio).

According to Johnson, the diary was written ‘higgledy-piggledy on any scrap of paper that came to hand - auctioneer’s announcements, instructions for collecting the first income tax and taking the first census, lists of deserters from the Army and Navy, regulations to innkeepers to prevent tippling on their premises’. And he claimed that among the million documents at the Hertfordshire Records Office (at the time of writing) none ‘gives anything like so complete a picture of Hertfordshire life as seen not by the gentry but by an intelligent countryman during the long, perilous and exhausting period of the Napoleonic wars, and no other document reveals so frankly, so artlessly a Hertfordshire personality’. Old John Carrington, he concludes, ‘was in truth the Hertfordshire Pepys’.

Here are Carrington’s final diary entries (with Johnson’s commentary italicised for ease of reading), from The Hertfordshire Pepys.

‘ ‘Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Fryday at Home as Very Ill out no ware as Cannot Eate nor Drinke.’ Dr Colbeck prescribed powders and draughts.

‘Took more powders but Dont see they Do me good O Health wt is thy Value had I knowne it I would have Clippt yr Wings that you should not have flown me.’

‘Very poorly took nothing.’

‘Took no powders Eate a small piese of mutton.’

‘Took a draught this morning.’

‘At Home Very Little Better all ways Dry & no Stomak to Eate.’

‘Wednesday Ver Bad indeed with pane in my stomacke & all night no rest till Thrusdy mornign.’

‘Thursday mong 7 poll [his daughter] went to Drs & Brought a drauft for me I took it and am something Easer but cannot Eate & Drink I must not but slops am so dry.’

So his entries ran for some months, but far from continuously. Fight on he could - and did. He was at Ware paying in tax money, at St Albans on militia business, at Bramsfield vestry, at Bramfield workhouse, at quarter sessions and assizes - here, there and everywhere, even as far as London. . .

Early in 1810 ‘thank God I am better’ - but improvement was offset and morale depressed by attending (in foul weather) the funeral of more than one old boon companion. In April ‘in afternoon to Tewin sons I was desired to spend the evening their with some Friends . . . They was all Good Company til 10 Clock.’

It was his last jollification - except, of course, for the wedding feast of Mary Larman on May 7, after a week spent at some races at Kimpton, at St Albans on official business, at Hertford quarter sesssions and at Ware on tax affairs. Next day he noted the arrest for debt of the Tewin blacksmith and Jack’s prompt settlement on the smith’s behalf, and on the following day the removal of one of his old friends from Tewin to Essendon.

On May 10 ‘at home all day.’

Thus closes the diary that had faithfully, unselfconsciously and with complete revelation recorded his later life. On May 22 [1810] old John died of the stroke, brought about by severe kidney trouble, that had overtaken him ten days earlier.’

Flaubert the Realist

Today is the anniversary of the death of the French author, Gustave Flaubert. A fastidious writer, he produced few books in his life, but Madame Bovary is certainly considered one of the best French novels of all time. And Flaubert himself has an important place in the history of literature as a master of Realism. Interestingly, although he only appears to have kept a diary when travelling - particularly on a journey in Egypt - some believe his travel diary writing helped turn Flaubert from the Romantic he was to the Realist he would become.

Flaubert was born in 1821, in Rouen, the son of a surgeon. As a teenager, he fell in love with an older, married woman. In 1841, he began to study law in Paris, but, on discovering he suffered from a nervous disease, he abandoned the law so as to concentrate on writing. After his father died in 1846, he moved to Croisset on the Seine near Rouen where he lived with his mother (and the daughter of his sister who had died soon after his father had done). He was to remain at Croisset for most of his life. That same year, 1846, he fell in love with the poet Louise Colet. Their affair lasted to the mid-1850s, but it was Flaubert’s only serious romantic relationship. Otherwise, he visited prostitutes (and suffered from venereal disease).

Although Flaubert wrote a couple of novels in the 1940s, it was not until after returning from a long journey to the Orient, with his friend Maxime du Camp, that he began working on Madame Bovary, a novel that would take him five years to complete. When first serialised in Revue de Paris, it was considered immoral by the government, though legal actions to that effect failed. Flaubert’s next novel, Salammbô, took four years and a trip to Carthage to complete.

A fastidious writer, always in search of stylistic perfection, Flaubert produced only two or three more works in his life. His last work, over which he obsessed for years, was published posthumously and to mixed reviews - Bouvard et Pécuchet. Nevertheless, Madame Bovary remains one of the most famous French novels of all time, and, despite being a romantic at heart, Flaubert is credited with being a master of the Realist style in literature, and influencing many later writers, such as Zola and Kafka. He died 130 years ago today, on 8 May 1880. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and in a New Yorker review of a biography by Geoffrey Wall.

Flaubert was more of a letter writer than a diarist, but he did keep a journal on his travels, and the one he wrote while in the Orient has become a literature classic. First published in English by Bodley Head in 1972, as Flaubert in Egypt (with the subtitle A Sensibility on Tour; a Narrative drawn from Gustave Flaubert’s Travel Notes & Letters translated from the French & edited by Francis Steegmuller) it has since been republished as a Penguin Classic. A few pages can be read on the Amazon website, and even more of the book is viewable on Googlebooks.

Introducing Chapter IV of Flaubert in Egypt, in which Flaubert describes his experience of the Pyramids, Steegmuller draws attention to the idea that the ‘very act of keeping a travel diary played a role in carrying the Romantic Flaubert towards Realism.’ And to support this view, he gives a short example of Flaubert’s earlier writing, an imagined description of the pyramids. That ‘pantheistic rhapsody’, as Steegmuller calls it, starts as follows: ‘When the traveler has reached the top of the pyramid, his hands are torn and his knees are bleeding; he is surrounded by the desert and devoured by the light, and the harsh air burns his lungs; utterly exhausted and dazzled by their brilliance, he sinks down half dead on the stone, amidst the carcasses of birds come there to die. But lift your head! Look! Look! And you will see cities with domes of gold and minarets of porcelain, palaces of lava built on plinths of alabaster, marble-rimmed pools where sultanas come to bathe their bodies at the hour when the moon makes bluer the shadow of the groves and more limpid the silvery water of the fountains . . .’

And here, by contrast, is what Flaubert wrote in his diary when first seeing and experiencing the Sphinx and Pyramids for real.

7 December 1849
‘Set out at noon for the Pyramids. Maxime is mounted on a white horse that keeps jerking its head, Sassetti [a Corsican-born servant] on a small white horse, myself on a bay, Joseph [guide and interpreter] on a donkey. We pass Soliman Pasha’s gardens. Island of Roda. We cross the Nile in a small boat: while our horses are being led aboard, a corpse in its coffin is borne past us. Energy of our oarsmen: they sing, shouting out the rhythm as they bend forward and back. The sail swells full and we skim along fast.

Gizeh. Mud houses as at ‘Atfeh - palm grove. Two waterwheels, one turned by an ox and the other by a camel. Now stretching out before us in an immense plain, very green, with squares of black soil which are fields most recently plowed, the last from which the flood withdrew: they stand out like India ink on the solid green. I think of the invocation to Isis: ‘Hail, hail, black soil Egypt!’ The soil of Egypt is black. Some buffaloes are grazing, now and again a waterless muddy creek, in which our horses sink to their knees; soon we are crossing great puddles or creeks.

About half-past three we are almost on the edge of the desert, the three Pyramids looming up ahead of us. I can contain myself no longer, and dig in my spurs; my horse bursts into a gallop, splashing through the swamp. Two minutes later Maxime follows suit. Furious race. I begin to shout in spite of myself; we climb rapidly up to the Sphinx, clouds of sand swirling about us. At first our Arabs followed us, crying ‘Sphinx! Sphinx! Oh! Oh! Oh!’ It grew larger and larger, and rose out of the ground like a dog lifting itself up.

View of the Sphinx. Abu-el-Houl (Father of Terror). The sand, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, all gray and bathed in a great rosy light; the sky perfectly blue, eagles slowly wheeling and gliding around the tips of the Pyramids. We stop before the Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare; Maxime is quite pale; I am afraid of becoming giddy, and try to control my emotion. We ride off madly at full speed among the stones. We walk around the Pyramids, right at their feet. Our baggage is late in arriving; night falls. . .’

8 December 1849
‘Ascent. Up at five - the first - and wash in front of the tent in the canvas pail. We hear several jackals barking. Ascent of the Great Pyramid, the one to the right (Kheops). The stones, which at a distance of two hundred paces seem the size of paving-blocs, are in reality - the smallest of them - three feet high; generally they come up to our chests. We go up at the left hand corner (opposite the Pyramid of Khephren); the Arabs push and pull me; I am quickly exhausted, it is desperately tiring. I stop five or six times on the way up. Maxime started before me and goes fast. Finally I reach the top.

We wait a good half hour for the sunrise. The sun was rising just opposite; the whole valley of the Nile, bathed in mist, seemed to be a still white sea; and the desert behind us, with its hillocks of sand, another ocean, deep purple, its waves all petrified. But as the sun climbed behind the Arabian chain the mist was torn into great shreds of filmy gauze; the meadows, cut by canals, were like green lawns with winding borders. To sum up: three colors - immense green at my feet in the foreground; the sky pale red - worn vermilion; behind and to the right, a rolling expanse looking scorched and iridescent, with the minarets of Cairo, canges passing in the distance, clusters of palms. . .’

This cruelty too shall end

Today is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Anne Frank, who died aged 15 in a German concentration camp, is famous because of her diary, one of the most widely read books in the world. To mark the occasion, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands took part in a special ceremony held at the Westerkerk cathedral. She also formally opened a new room in the museum to house the diary and other manuscripts.

Anneliese Marie was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, but, with her family, moved to Amsterdam in 1933 to avoid persecution. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands, her family hid for two years in a secret annex located in her father’s business premises - the business’s employees helping to provide supplies. During this time, Anne wrote a diary. The family was betrayed to the Germans in 1944, and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne died of typhoid aged only 15. Her sister and mother also died in concentration camps.

The diary, which was recovered by one of the employees, was later returned to Anne’s father, the only member of the family to have survived. He published it under the title Het Achterhuis (The Annex) in 1947. A few years later, in 1952, it was translated into English and published as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company in the US and Valentine Mitchell in the UK. Since then it has been the source for many other published versions and translations (as well as for films and plays) and is widely read all over the world - a Fox News article in 2007 reported that the diary had been translated into 65 languages and had sold 30 million copies.

There is a mass of information about Anne Frank and her diary on the internet. The websites of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Women’s Archive both have biographies, as does Wikipedia of course (with an additional article on the diary itself). The Diary Junction has a few links to extracts from the diary.

The Anne Frank House, a museum based in the very place where the Franks lived secretly, was officially opened on 3 May 1960 - half a century ago today. The first year saw around 9,000 visitors, but the museum now averages around one million visitors every year. A few days ago, on 28 April, some 600 invited guests attended a special ceremony in the Westerkerk cathedral to mark the anniversary. A highlight of the ceremony, according to the museum’s website, was a presentation of the Online Secret Annexe, ‘which allows people all over the world to make a virtual visit to the hiding place of Anne Frank and those who sheltered there with her’. Before the ceremony, Queen Beatrix visited the museum and opened a new ‘diary room’ where all the diaries and other manuscripts of Anne Frank will be on display for the first time.

Here are a few excerpts found on the websites of the Anne Frank Center USA and the BBC.

9 October 1942
‘Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they’re sending all the Jews . . . If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. . . Have you ever heard the term ‘hostages’? That’s the latest punishment for saboteurs. It’s the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens - innocent people - are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can’t find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall. You read the announcements of their death in the paper, where they’re referred to as ‘fatal accidents’.

13 January 1943
‘At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a rucksack and a little cash with them, and even then, they are robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed and their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared.’

3 February 1944
‘I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway. I’ll just let matters take their course and concentrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end.’

15 July 1944
‘It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. . . It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.’

One wave after another

Eighty years ago today, ‘with this very nib-ful of ink’, Virginia Woolf finished a first draft of her most experimental novel, The Waves. It is ‘full of holes and patches’, she tells her diary, and needs ‘re-building’. A few days later, she wants to begin cutting out ‘masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another.’

Virginia was the second daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the National Biography. The family, very well connected in literary circles, lived in Hyde Park Gate but had a country home at St Ives in Cornwall. Woolf’s mother died when she was 13 and her father died ten years later. Both these losses precipitated mental breakdowns which left the young Virginia psychologically fragile for the rest of her life. She settled in Gordon Square with her sister Vanessa and her brother Adrian, and subsequently married Leonard Sidney Woolf. The Woolfs and their many literary friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1917, Virginia and Leonard launched the Hogarth Press, which published their own works as well as those by other literary and artist figures, such as T S Eliot, Laurens van der Post, Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell. Two years later, they bought Monks House in Rodmell, East Sussex. It was there, and in the 1920s, that Virginia wrote most of her novels, such as To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). It was also during the 1920s that she had a long-term affair with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson.

According to the Wikipedia biography, the onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to a biography of her late friend Roger Fry all contributed to a growing depression. On 28 March 1941, she put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself. Further biographical information is available from The British Library, Biography.com or The Virginia Woolf Society.

Although she did not write a diary every day, Virginia Woolf was a committed diarist. She began keeping a journal in 1915 and continued to do so until a few days before her death. Extracts were published for the first time in A Writer’s Diary by The Hogarth Press in 1953. The extracts were chosen by Leonard Woolf specifically to reflect his wife’s life as a writer. In the introduction, though, he talks more generally about Virginia’s diary, and says: [It] gives for 27 years a consecutive record of what she did, of the people whom she saw, and particularly of what she thought about those people, about herself, about life, and about the books she was writing or hoped to write.’

A much fuller (and more faithful - Leonard had made Virginia’s prose more formal than it was) version of the diary was published by The Hogarth Press in five volumes during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were edited by Anne Olivier Bell, the wife of Woolf’s nephew, and were much acclaimed at the time. Apart from being beautifully written in their own right, they also provide a first-hand account of the revered Bloomsbury Group, and an excellent insight into a writer’s creative processes. See The Diary Junction for links to a few online extracts.

Here, though, are two extracts from A Writer’s Diary, the first taken from exactly 80 years ago today, when Virginia was finishing a first draft of The Waves, a novel that would prove to be her most experimental (Internet Archive has the e-texts of both works freely available).

29 April 1930
‘And I have just finished, with this very nib-ful of ink, the last sentence of The Waves. I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I don’t think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly and ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy and fluent; and this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer - or three weeks - at Rodmell, after finishing The Lighthouse. (And that reminds me - I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched - something imaginative, if possible, and light; for I shall tire of Hazlitt and criticism after the first divine relief; and I feel pleasantly aware of various adumbrations in the back of my head; a life of Duncan; no, something about canvases glowing in a studio; but that can wait.)

And I think to myself as I walk down Southampton Row, ‘And I have given you a new book.’ ’

1 May 1930
‘And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent me a book from The Times, as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; and feeling my liberty wild upon me, I rushed to the cable and told Van Doren I would write on Scott. And now having read Scott, or the editor whom Hugh provides, I won’t and can’t; and have got into a fret trying to read it, and writing to Richmond to say I can’t: have wasted the brilliant first of May which makes my skylight blue and gold; have only a rubbish heap in my head; can’t read and can’t write and can’t think. The truth is, of course, I want to be back at The Waves. Yes that is the truth. Unlike all that I begin to re-write it, or conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done it. I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. And so on. But then we are going touring in Devon and Cornwall on Sunday, which means a week off; and then I shall perhaps make my critical brain do a month’s work for exercise. What could it be set to? Or a story? - no, not another story now . . .’

Napoleon’s young bride

‘I set out from Compiegne, delighted with the idea of such a pleasant journey. I had never before travelled without sadness, but now felt the undertaking would be delightful and am certain I shall love travelling to distraction. . . In every place the Emperor was received by the inhabitants with ringing of bells and firing of salutes, expressions of a devotion as simple as it was touching. Everywhere the young ladies presented us with flowers and poems, most of the latter were very poor.’ Thus wrote Napoleon’s second wife, the 19 year-old Marie Louise, in a diary exactly 200 years ago today, at the very start of her first royal visit, and only weeks after she had married Emperor Napoleon.

Marie Louise was born in 1791 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, the daughter of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, and of his second wife, Maria Teresa. In March 1810, she was married by proxy to the French Emperor Napoleon, a further ceremony taking place in the chapel of the Louvre on 1 April 1810. For Napoleon, this his second marriage was both an attempt to father a legitimate heir and to validate his Empire by marrying a member of the House of Habsburg, one of the oldest ruling families of Europe. Napoleon and Marie Louise had one son, in 1911, given the title King of Rome (and the future Napoleon II).

For short periods when Napoleon was absent, Marie Louise acted as Regent of France. But when Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba, she returned to Austria, and, under the terms of Treaty of Fontainebleau, became the Duchess of Parma (and other territories). In 1821, four months after Napoleon’s death, Marie Louise married her lover, Count Adam Albert von Neipperg (having already borne him two children; another one would follow). Together they governed their duchies more liberally than did most other princes in Italy. After Neipperg’s death she married again, to Charles-René, Count of Bombelles in 1834; and she died in 1847. For more biographical information see Wikipedia or an entry at Authorama.

A first edition of Marie Louise’s diaries was edited by Frédéric Masson and published in 1922 by John Murray, London, with the title The Private Diaries of the Empress Marie-Louise. Masson explains, in his introduction, how he found the diaries:

‘In 1918 I received a communication from London in which Lady Thompson invited me to consider a Diary of the Journeys of the Empress Marie-Louise, which had been bequeathed to her, with a view to its publication. I accepted this proposal with much pleasure, and shortly after received the manuscript, the contents of which convinced me of its authenticity. This manuscript, the size of note-paper, is bound into a red morocco volume, the covers and fly-leaves being lined with green satin. The script is contemporaneous with the early years of last century, being regular and well-formed. At first it did not appear to me to be the handwriting of the Empress; the perusal of the text, however, removed all doubt as to its origin.

In answer to my inquiries as to how this manuscript had come into her possession, Lady Thompson forwarded me a letter from her grandmother, Mrs Smijth Windham, which runs as follows: ‘In the year 1836 I became acquainted with a Swiss governess, called Mdlle Muller, who lived many years with Lady Jane Peel. She was very intimate with a governess I had for my children, and I came into the room one day as she was reading these Memoirs to her friend. I stopped to listen, and then borrowed the book, which amused us much. Some months after this I proposed to her to let me purchase it, and after some hesitation she agreed. All she knew of it was, her brother Monsieur Mullier was tutor to one of Marie-Louise’s pages who was in waiting when she escaped from the Tuileries; he picked it up from the floor and gave it to his tutor some time afterwards. The page’s name is written in small characters on the first leaf of the book - Vicomte de . . . - I forget the name. This is all I know. Kath. Smijth Windham.’

Nevertheless, there are cogent proofs to demonstrate the authenticity of the manuscript. It is divided into three parts; the first records the Imperial journey in the departments of Northern France and Belgium, between April 27 and May 13, 1810; the second comprises the journey of Marie-Louise to Mayence from July 23 to August 9, 1813; the third, her journey to Cherbourg from August 23 to September 5, 1813. These three journeys mark important epochs in the Emperor’s history; the first was made in the full enjoyment and splendour of a destiny fulfilled; the second and the third were undertaken when sinister rumours were in the air, when treason was breeding, when the very basis of the system, the Austrian Alliance, had been destroyed. . . The Diary commences on April 27, 1810, the journey during which Marie-Louise jotted down the first pages. . .

And here are the first entries in that diary from exactly two centuries ago today (taken from the etext of The Private Diaries of the Empress Marie-Louise which is freely available at Internet Archive).

27 April 1810
‘I set out from Compiegne, delighted with the idea of such a pleasant journey. I had never before travelled without sadness, but now felt the undertaking would be delightful and am certain I shall love travelling to distraction. The Queen of Naples and the Grand Duke of Wurtzburg accompanied us. It was a particular pleasure to have the latter with me, he is so kind and vivacious.

We left Compiegne on April 27 at nine in the morning. The country as far as St Quentin is very pretty, even beautiful, also very fertile. All along the road are little hills covered with fruit trees now in full bloom, and fields of the most fascinating green intersected by small streams bordered with willows. There are many hamlets and villages, but what struck me most was the quantity of wind-mills.

In every place the Emperor was received by the inhabitants with ringing of bells and firing of salutes, expressions of a devotion as simple as it was touching. Everywhere the young ladies presented us with flowers and poems, most of the latter were very poor.

We arrive at St Quentin at midday and were lodged in the Préfecture where everything was uncomfortable and dirty, and what was worse was the fact that I was a quarter of a league away from the Emperor. He took luncheon at once and rode off to visit the fortifications and the source of the St Quentin canal, which had just been finished from a plan provided by the Emperor himself. I went to bed with lumbago, not yet being accustomed to continuous travelling over paved roads.

The Emperor made me get up at four o’clock to visit a cotton-mill belonging to the prefect, which is remarkable, the machines are wonderful inventions.

On our return we received the chief officials. The Emperor conversed with them for over two hours. These audiences are enough to kill one, for it is necessary to stand all the time! Afterwards young ladies presented me with specimens from their factories.

The Emperor was much amused while telling me of an accident which happened to M Joan [Jouan, knight of the Legion of Honour, surgeon-major] who, while galloping without looking where he was going, was caught on the branch of a tree; the horse went on and after a few minutes he fell to the ground without hurting himself in the least. Malicious tongues say that for more than an hour he thought himself dead, which is very like him!

After dinner there was a ball at the town hall and a cantata was sung which contained the most fulsome compliments. The Queen opened the ball by dancing a Contredance francaise with Chamberlain de Metternich.

The town of St Quentin has about 12,000 inhabitants. It is very old and badly built, but commercially flourishing. The local manufactures are longcloth, linen, cambric, leather, and morocco; the trade in cotton brings in over 3 millions annually.

The next day
We left St Quentin at seven in the morning, and after passing through the whole of the city, which is not very large, we arrived at the canal, where we found two gondolas awaiting us. The canal begins at St Quentin and terminates at Cambrai, where it joins the Scheldt. It is over 22 leagues in length having 23 locks, and is very wide and deep. We went on board and continued our way beneath a blazing sun which gave us terrible headaches. We reached the first tunnel into which the water had not yet been admitted and entered carriages in order to pass through it. The length is a quarter of a league, entirely cut out of the rock. The vault is very high and was illuminated by two rows of lamps which made a magnificent effect. It is a masterpiece, unique of its kind. We continued our journey by carriage as far as the entrance to the second tunnel, where tents had been pitched for lunch, which we welcomed like famished travellers. We went through this tunnel, which is a league and a half long, in a boat rowed by men, which was not very serviceable, for it let in two inches of water, which wetted our feet, but as there was no means of remedying it, one had to bear up gaily, which for me was not difficult as I have an iron constitution which nothing injures. In addition we narrowly escaped capsizing because the fat Prince Schwarzenberg was continually leaning out of the boat and his weight threw it all on one side. This second tunnel was illuminated like the first, and at the end of every hundred toises (about 650 feet) there was a shaft to let in daylight. After an hour and a half we reached the mouth of the canal and got into the carriages again.

We saw the source of the Scheldt, that majestic river, which 40 leagues farther on is so wide and deep that the largest battleships can navigate it, but is here so narrow that one can easily cross it by a standing jump. It passes twice under the canal, which is carried over it by means of an aqueduct; the bridge is so narrow that we were obliged to leave the carriages which were then lifted over by men. This affair delayed us more than an hour and put the Queen of Naples into such a bad temper that no one could speak to her for the rest of the day. I cannot understand how people when travelling can grumble and get impatient over such trifling accidents! To me they were very insignificant in comparison with all I had had to put up with in other journeys, of which I had never complained.

We went on board again half a league from Cambrai, and at half-past three entered the basin at the end of the canal, where a number of trading vessels, laden with coal, were waiting to enter the canal to carry their cargoes to Paris.

On reaching the Hotel de Ville I went to bed, for the sun had given me a shocking headache. I was, however, quite pleased with myself at not having grumbled once during the journey. Truly the bad temper of several of the ladies was enough to prevent me from fault finding.’

Daffodils so beautiful

William Wordsworth, one of the great British Romantic poets, died 160 years ago today. Although he was not a diarist, his sister, Dorothy, was - and not a bad one either. She never wrote for publication, nor was she published in her lifetime, but her journals, when they were finally put into print 40 years after her death, revealed not only a writer of great literary talent but also much about her brother’s life and, in particular, the genesis of his poems.

Both William and Dorothy were born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770 and 1771 respectively. Their parents were reasonably well off but, when their mother died in 1778, they were separated. William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, near Windermere, and then, from 1787, he studied at Cambridge. That same year he made his debut as a writer with a sonnet in The European Magazine. Having already been to the continent on a hiking tour, he returned to France in 1791, and became passionate for the Republic cause. He also had an affair with Annette Vallon who, a year later, bore him an illegitimate daughter, Caroline. William, however, was obliged to return to England; and war with France kept him away for nearly a decade.

In 1793, William Wordsworth published his first poetry collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Two years later he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset, and two further years later, William and Dorothy, moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles from Coleridge’s home. Together, William Wordsworth and Coleridge (with contributions from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798 - which is considered an important work in the English Romantic movement.

The three friends then travelled to Germany before William and Dorothy moved to the Lake district, near Grasmere. William went on to marry Mary Hutchinson who bore him five children, two of whom died while young. When Robert Southey died in 1843, Wordsworth was named Poet Laureate. By 1805, William had already completed a first draft of, what is now considered, his autobiographical masterpiece, but it was only published posthumously, as The Prelude. He died on 23 April 1850 - 160 years ago today. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Victorian Web, The Poetry Foundation or The Atlantic.

Dorothy lived to 1855, but for the last 20 years she was plagued by physical and mental illness. None of her writing was ever published in her lifetime - mostly she wrote exclusively for herself and her brother - but the journals are considered to be beautifully written and important works of literature in their own right. Moreover, they are important because they throw light on William’s life and, in particular, the circumstances of the writing of many, if not most, of his poems. It is clear that William was often inspired by his sister, but some acedamics argue that he might have borrowed from her writing too.

Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth was first edited by W Knight and published in two volumes by Macmillan in 1897. These editions are freely available at Internet Archive, but many other editions were published in the 20th century. Further information and links for extracts from her diaries are available at The Diary Junction.

Here are two extracts from Dorothy’s journal written while at Grasmere (taken from a 1941 edition of the Journals edited by E de Selincourt). Both relate to poems her brother was writing or would write. The second extract is generally considered to be about the walk which inspired one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems, Daffodils, which starts: ‘I wander’d lonely as a cloud’.

14 March 1802
‘William had slept badly - he got up at nine o’clock, but before he rose he had finished The Beggar Boys, and while we were at breakfast that is (for I had breakfasted) he, with his basin of broth before him untouched, and a little plate of bread and butter he wrote the Poem to a Butterfly! He ate not a morsel, nor put on his stockings, but sate with his shirt neck unbuttoned, and his waistcoat open while he did it. The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always feel at the sight of a butterfly. I told him that I used to chase them a little, but that I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, and did not catch them. He told me how they used to kill all the white ones when he went to school because they were Frenchmen. Mr Simpson came in just as he was finishing the Poem. After he was gone I wrote it down and the other poems, and I read them all over to him. We then called at Mr Oliff’s - Mr O walked with us to within sight of Rydale - the sun shone very pleasantly, yet it was extremely cold. We dined and then Wm went to bed. I lay upon the fur gown before the fire, but I could not sleep - I lay there a long time. It is now halfpast 5 - I am going to write letters - I began to write to Mrs Rawson. William rose without having slept - we sate comfortably by the fire till he began to try to alter The Butterfly, and tired himself - he went to bed tired.’

15 April 1802
‘It was a threatening, misty morning, but mild. We set off after dinner from Eusemere. Mrs Clarkson went a short way with us, but turned back. The wind was furious, and we thought we must have returned. We first rested in the large boat-house, then under a furze [gorse] bush opposite Mr Clarkson’s. Saw the plough going in the field. The wind seized our breath. The Lake was rough. There was a boat by itself floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock. We rested again in Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish, but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows - people working. A few primroses by the roadside - woodsorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry, yellow flower which Mrs C calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers a few yards higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the sea. Rain came on . . .’

Fifty heads in one day

Oxford University Press has just re-published Antera Duke’s diary. Antera Duke was an African slave-trading chief, and his diary is said to be the only surviving eyewitness account of slave trading by an African merchant. And pretty callous the trade was too. One entry in the diary reads: ‘So we got ready to cut heads off and at 5 o’clock in the morning we began to cut slaves’ heads off, fifty heads off in that one day.’

Not much is known about Antera Duke. He is thought to have been born around 1735 and to have died around 1809. He was an Efik chief from Duke Town, Calabar in eastern Nigeria (now in Cross River State) about 40 miles from the Atlantic Ocean - see Wikipedia for more on the Efik people. But, thanks to a diary he kept, we also know he was a slave trader.

Written in Nigerian Pidgin English, the diary was discovered in Scotland over half a century ago, and published in 1956 for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press (OUP): Efik Traders of Old Calabar: Containing the Diary of Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-Trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century together with an Ethnographic Sketch and Notes by Donald Simmons & an Essay on the Political Organization of Old Calabar by G. I. Jones. This diary is said to be the only surviving eyewitness account of the slave trade by an African merchant, thus providing valuable information on Old Calabar’s economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce, and provisions.

OUP has now (February in the US, May in the UK - see Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk) brought out a new edition of Antera’s diary with the original (and difficult to understand) trade-English along side a translation into standard English on facing pages. The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader is edited by Stephen D Behrendt, A J H Latham and David Northrup. The publisher says the new edition draws on the latest scholarship: ‘Introductory essays set the stage for the Old Calabar of Antera Duke’s lifetime, explore the range of trades, from slaves to produce, in which he rose to prominence, and follow Antera on trading missions across an extensive commercial hinterland. The essays trace the settlement and development of the towns that comprised Old Calabar and survey the community’s social and political structure, rivalries among families, sacrifices of slaves, and witchcraft ordeals.’

Jon Silkin, writing a review of the 1956 edition for African Affairs, found the diary itself fascinating but was not very impressed by the scholarship attached to it. He wrote: ‘The most enlightening two sections in the book, enlightening in the sense that they tell you more about the Efiks than any of the stuff elsewhere, are the two versions of the fascinating diary kept by Antera Duke. These two versions: the original one and its more Anglicised equivalent, re-inforce what after all one might suspect the people to have been: avaricious, anxiety-ridden, superstitious, cheerful, propitiatory and extremely cruel, capable of extreme savagery and violence not only on other tribes (whom they enslaved), but on their criminals (whom they also enslaved) as well as each other.’

He provides an example of the diary in the two versions (1787, but otherwise undated):

Original: ‘. . . wee tak grandy Egbo and cany to Henshaw and Willy Tom for brow for not Captain for send and Callabar poun was putt for tak my slave goods to not send them poun way in Tender so wee have Tatam Tender go away with 330 slaves . . .’

Transcription: ‘We carried Grand Ekpe to Henshaw and Willy Tom to blow forbidding and Captain to send Calabar pawn, which was given for my slave goods, away in his tender. Tatam’s tender went away with 330 slaves. . .’

And here is a final diary entry, Silkin says, which treats cruelty with all the assumption of naturalness.

‘About 4 a.m. I got up; there was great rain, so I walked to the town palaver house and I found all the gentlemen here. So we got ready to cut heads off and at 5 o’clock in the morning we began to cut slaves’ heads off, fifty heads off in that one day . . .’

Charge of the Light Brigade

‘Many officers of Light cavalry were killed, and a number slightly wounded. There were no infantry early in the morning, and when they did come they were not engaged. The light cavalry were murdered in doing work, when infantry should have been first engaged, and artillery were indispensable. A very fine, warm day.’ This is Edward Hodge, a British army officer born 200 years ago today, writing in his diary about the Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the most famous incidents of the Crimean War.

Born in Weymouth, Dorset, on 19 April 1810, Edward Cooper Hodge was the only son of Major Edward Hodge, a soldier who distinguished himself throughout the Napoleonic wars but who died when his son was only five. Educated at Eton, Edward Cooper developed a reputation at rowing. In 1826, he left the school to join his mother and sisters in Paris. Aged 16, he was given a Cornetcy in the 13th Light Dragoons but, after only four months, switched to the 4th Dragoon Guards, in which he served throughout his army career, reaching the rank of general. He died in 1894. A little more biographical information is available from the British Medals and Irish Masonic History websites.

Hodge is remembered largely because of a diary he kept during the Crimean War. It was edited by the Marquess of Anglesey, and published by Leo Cooper 1971 as Little Hodge: Being Extracts from the Diaries and Letters of Colonel Edward Cooper Hodge Written During the Crimean War, 1854-1856.

The Crimean War, part of a larger conflict for influence over lands once dominated by the Ottoman Empire, was fought in the mid-1850s between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the British, French and Ottoman Empires. The Battle of Balaclava, on 25 October 1854, was one of the key events of a campaign within the Crimean War to capture Sevastopol, Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea. And much the best remembered event of that battle if not of the whole Crimean War is the Charge of the Light Brigade, which was immortalised in a poem by Alfred Tennyson.

Hodge’s diary is filled with short succinct entries, though one of the longest is for the day of the Battle of Balaclava. Here is that entry, and another short one for the following day.

25 October 1854
‘The Russians in great force attacked the outposts and forts garrisoned by the Turks, who were quickly turned out with a loss of 9 guns.

In fact the Turks, opposed by at least ten times their number, put up an heroic resistance which gave the allies more than an hour’s invaluable breathing space.

After suffering 170 casualties, they were driven from the first three redoubts. The Russians now poured infantry into these, and brought up to them a number of field-pieces. All this time Lucan could do nothing but make threatening demonstrations whilst falling back before the slowly advancing Russians, and ordering his horse artillery to try to reply to their much bigger guns. On Sir Colin Campbell’s advice, Lucan soon withdrew to the left, so as to be out of the line of fire of both the Russian guns and the 93rd, and in a position to attack the flank of the Russians should they charge the Scottish infantry. This now happened.

Their cavalry attacked the 93rd, who perceived them with a volley, and turned them.

The left column was only a small part of Liprandi’s mounted arm, perhaps 400 in number. Almost immediately after its defeat, a large body of cavalry came into the plain and were charged by the Greys and the Inniskillings. We were in reserve, and I brought forward our left and charged these cavalry in flank. The Greys were a little in confusion and retiring when our charge settled the business. We completely routed the hussars and cossacks, and drove them back.

[The editor, the Marquess of Anglesey, says here: ‘A more pithy description of the charge of the Heavy Brigade does not exist.’]

They retired, and then Lord Raglan should have been satisfied. The Russians retired to a strong position, a valley with batteries on the heights in front and on each flank. There was a battery of 9 guns in front of us, and a body of cavalry, and all these batteries on the heights.

Lord Raglan ordered the light cavalry to charge these guns and cavalry. They did so in the most gallant manner, but at the sacrifice of nearly the Brigade. The guns played upon them at about 200 yards from the batteries in front and flank. They advanced, took the guns, and charged the cavalry, who met them well. They were so knocked to pieces by the guns that the cavalry overpowered them, and they were obliged to retire having lost in every regiment some two 3rds of their men and officers. We advanced to cover their retreat, but the batteries got our range and began cutting us up terribly. I was not sorry when we were ordered to retreat.

[The editor says here: ‘Except for the facile way in which the blame for it is unhesitatingly placed upon Raglan, this is a surprisingly accurate outline of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade.’]

The Russians did not follow, or quit their strong position, and we remained on the ground till 8pm, when we were ordered to return to our camp, and to go to the rear some two miles, which we did.

Both my servants got brutally drunk, and I found them lying on their backs, and with difficulty I was enabled to save my baggage. I got up my bed in Forrest’s tent and slept there.

Our loss today was 1 killed (Ryan), 1 severely (Scanlan) and 4 slightly wounded.

Many officers of Light cavalry were killed, and a number slightly wounded. There were no infantry early in the morning, and when they did come they were not engaged. The light cavalry were murdered in doing work, when infantry should have been first engaged, and artillery were indispensable. A very fine, warm day.’

26 October 1854
‘I find my rascally servants not only got drunk, but they committed robberies upon the officers’ stores. They have lost my tent, and I only wonder that I have any kit left. I am most uncomfortable with such blackguards as these about me. I am far from well today. I am much purged and griped.’

Diary briefs

Battle of Britain diaries to be tweeted in real time - The Daily Telegraph

Twitter Updates likened to 18th century diaries - The Wall Street Journal

Diaries of the seventeenth century by Dr Mark Knights - BBC

More sex and bribery diaries in China (see also . . . and 50,000 yuan) - China Daily

Two days in Alicante

Today is the 30th anniversary of the day I met Manu in an Ibiza cafe, a lovely man with whom I am still in touch today. But that encounter only happened because, after a fated bus ride from Madrid, I’d missed a boat by minutes and been stranded in Alicante for two days. Here is how I wrote the story in my diary all those 30 years ago.

3 April 1980
‘At first I didn’t even know if I wanted to go to Ibiza, I thought I might go to Barcelona and thence to Menorca. So, right at the beginning, I was full of indecision. As the weekend turned itself over slowly, though, I began to make plans to go to Ibiza.

Pepe rings a friend who works for the shipping company. Although the boat is already booked up, she says she will get me a ticket. On Monday I go to collect it - leaving at midnight Wednesday 2 April.

In the afternoon, I go to the Corte Ingles travel agency where I’m told there is no place on the Wednesday afternoon train to Alicante, I swear under my breath, and let her book me on the morning train. I am not happy because this means I lose the Wednesday but I still have work to do. Back at the flat, I talk with Pepe and Pia, who suggest I go by bus. It takes some effort, but eventually I get the number for Estacion Sur and am told there is a bus leaving at 2pm on Wednesday. I run to Estacion Sur, but, on arriving, my heart sinks at the sight of the long queues. I suffer two hours of waiting. Fights and arguments break out everywhere, tempers are high. I finish a novel before arriving at the ticket office. Once at the buying window I discover there is an even later bus at 3:30pm (arriving at 9pm) as well as at 2:00, so I buy a ticket for that bus and head back for the apartment. I am pleased with myself that I’ve managed to sort out an itinerary.

The following morning between work appointments I squeeze a visit to the Corte Ingles to cash in my train ticket. I lose £2.50 on the refund, but at least everything is organised. I begin to look forward to Ibiza. I spend Wednesday on the telephone working, but none of the work proves useful, and I could so easily have taken the 2:00 bus.

On the 3:30 bus - all the way there are long queues of holiday traffic, and long, long waits, and the bus is three hours late. A taxi speeds me through the streets, clocking up pesetas, faster, faster, down to the port, along the quay, but by the time I get to the quay, the boat has left - 10 minutes earlier! Now there isn’t another boat for two days.

I am by the stone columns of a church that is now three-quarters cinema and one quarter cafe. . . I walk around the old city of Alicante, looking for a smile, a meeting, a hand to touch. One area seems very alive with hip youth. They move about from group to group, bar to bar, stand around drinking wine and rolling cigarettes fuelled with grass. Not far away another mass of people - the old, the mourning, the middle-aged, the regimented young, the crippled and the scarred - are pouring out of mass.’

5 April 1980
‘I made it. Ibiza. I managed to use the wrongly-dated ticket, but only just. My adrenalin was on its racing track. There was some confusion as I was checked against the cabin list but the official failed to notice the wrong date.

In the queue to get on the boat I befriended Ronny, a guitarist, who says he can live from playing, but is not good enough to get rich. He has blond hair curling all over his brown-tanned face. He has just spent two weeks on a boat skippered by his brother. It’s a half-a-million job and its owner hasn’t been near it in 18 months. He tells stories of contracts with ATV and MAM and the guitar centre in Palma where he hopes to work. When he has money he spends it, first class all the way. He doesn’t believe in guarding it at all, and explains why: he had a girlfriend who had used all her savings to start a hairdressing business, then, after a year or so when it was going very well, she was riding her bicycle and was killed by a lorry. He tells me that he also knew the daughter of the pilot that was flying a Trident in which a hundred people were killed near Heathrow ten years ago. Apparently, the pilot had a heart condition and put the wrong signals into the computer!

Although it started to rain on arriving, I was not unlucky. Within half an hour, I met a man called Manu. He happens to be at the Lecoq school in Paris and knows my friend Harold, and has a house on the other side of the island. Manu’s father, a German painter, lives half in Berlin and half in Ibiza. Manu himself speaks at least five languages, and is an accomplished musician. Right now, though, he’s into theatre. We drink yierba at Ibecenco and wine at Pepi’s with home cured sausage and baked bread.

Alicante, as it happens, only got better and better. I discovered El Castillo de Santa Barbara and some beautiful terraced houses. I watched Easter processions with all those shiny satin clothes and dunce hats. I wrote my business report. I ate a meal, I talked to some English people. I took lots of photos. The two days weren’t so bad after all.’

Music was sounding

‘When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew even louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music!’ This is Cosima Liszt Wagner - who died 80 years ago today - writing in her diary about the first birthday she celebrated as Richard Wagner’s wife. Her diaries, written very much to be a record about Wagner rather than herself, are justly famous because they provide so much interesting and intimate detail about his domestic and composing life.

Cosima, born at Bellagio, Italy, was the illegitimate daughter of the famous pianist and composer, Franz Liszt, and Countess Marie d’Agoult, an author who later used the pen name Daniel Stern. In 1857, Cosima married Hans von Bülow, an orchestral conductor, who mistreated her. They had two children. In 1862, she became the mistress of the German composer, Wagner, who was much older than she, and also married. From 1866, they lived together at the villa Triebschen, provided by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, on the shore of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. She had three children with Wagner, all of whom were born before they finally married in 1870. After the death of Wagner, in 1883, she became director of the Bayreuth Festival. She died on 1 April 1930, eighty years ago today.

The detailed diary kept by Cosima about her life with Wagner was suppressed for nearly a century, largely by Eva, their youngest daughter, but was finally published in English in two volumes by Collins, London, in 1978 and 1980 (and by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York). Volume one of Cosima Wagner Diaries covers the period 1869 to 1877, and volume two 1878-1883. Both are edited and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack and translated by Geoffrey Skelton. More recently, in 1997, Yale University Press published Cosima Wagner’s Diaries: An Abridgement - a few pages can be read at Amazon.com. Otherwise, several websites have some extracts from the diaries: The Nietzsche Channel, Porges.net and The Guardian.

Skelton, in his introduction, explains how Cosima began keeping a diary to continue a biographical account of Wagner’s life that until then he himself had been writing in the form of autobiographical notes - and this was at the request of King Ludwig II. Once together with Cosima, he claimed she was better able to continue the biography. Occasionally, though, Wagner himself would write in the diary, or comment on Cosima’s entries.

‘Whatever the original intention,’ Skelton says, ‘it is clear from the very first page of her Diaries that Cosima considered them as much more than mere aids to memory for a future biography. Their avowed purpose was to provide a sort of apologia for her children, so that in later years they would be better able to understand her conduct in leaving Hans von Bülow for Richard Wagner, and would at the same time gain a proper appreciation of the man of genius to whom she had dedicated her life. If she frequently loses sight of this maternal intention and to confide in her diary intimate reflections of a purely private kind, she never forgot that the focus of her attention was always Richard. On the only occasion when she left home alone with the children for a few days, she made no entries, since she had nothing to record about him. And the last entry (February 12, 1883) was made on the day before he died.’

Here are a few extracts. The first and last were written on her birthday - the former on her first birthday with Wagner after their marriage the previous August.

25 December 1870
‘About this day, my children, I can tell you nothing - nothing about my feelings, nothing about my mood, nothing, nothing, nothing. I shall just tell you, dryly and plainly, what happened. When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew even louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! After it had died away, R came in to me with the five children and put into my hands the score of his Symphonic Birthday Greeting. I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household; R had set up his orchestra on the stairs and thus consecrated our Tribschen forever! The Tribschen Idyll - thus the work is called. - At midday Dr Sulzer arrived, surely the most important of R’s friends! After breakfast the orchestra again assembled, and now once again the Idyll was heard in the lower apartment, moving us all profoundly (Countess B was also there, on my invitation); after it the Lohengrin wedding procession, Beethoven’s Septet, and, to end with, once more the work of which I shall never hear enough! - Now at last I understood all R’s working in secret, also dear Richter’s trumpet (he blazed out the Siegfried theme splendidly and had learned the trumpet especially to do it), which had won him many admonishments from me. ‘Now let me die,’ I exclaimed to R ‘It would be easier to die for me than to live for me,’ he replied. - In the evening R reads his Meistersinger to Dr Sulzer, who did not know it; and I take as much delight in it as if it were something completely new. This makes R say, ‘I wanted to read Sulzer Die Ms, and it turned into a dialogue between us two.’

27 June 1871
‘Still rain; but R is working - that is my sunshine! When, visiting him while he is at work, I tell him that, he says; ‘And do you know what makes me feel so irresponsible toward everything? The fact that I have you; none of our evil experiences touches the nerve of things; so I, too, can be single-minded. If I had had you with me in Paris, I should not have let myself in for all those things. The only trouble is, we came together late, I want to enjoy it for a long time yet.’ - Uncharitable feelings over my father’s behaviour. - R has composed Hagen’s aria [Hagen - a character in Götterdämmerung]. He says, ‘While doing it I was thinking of you asleep; I was uncertain whether to let himself express himself in silence or not; then I remembered how you talk in your dreams, and I saw I could let Hagen voice his emotions, which is much better.’ . .’

27 June 1872
‘R reads in the newspaper that there have been uprisings among the workers in Vienna, and again it is the misguided poor people who have been punished and persecuted. ‘The demagogues, the ringleaders, should be trodden underfoot like vermin,’ says R, very indignant that the misguided people are once again the victims. - Visit from the conductor Herbeck. Proposals for Vienna, inquiry whether R would perhaps do Die Walküre there, before Bayreuth - all of it nonsense. - Family lunch, the faces of musicians are discussed, and R says the handsomest was Méhul’s. On my remarking that these French musicians (Grétry, Méhul, etc.) were very gifted: ‘Oh the French are significant, no question of that, what they lack is an ideal, something which, when it comes to the point, doesn’t concern itself at all with form - like Bach for instance, who simply ignored the laws of euphony, which meant everything to the Italians, in favor of independence for his voices.’ - R has done some work, despite the interruption of Herr H. Walk with the children after the rain, renewed pleasure in the park: ‘If one could conjure it up with a wish, one couldn’t make it any lovelier.’ In the evening took up our old Gibbon again and continued with him, remarking as we did so that the English are much better and more original interpreters of Latin ways, their classical form and their settled outlook, than the French.’

27 June 1874
‘Quite a lot of things all at once; furnishing of the hall, which is to be consecrated today; visit from the machinist Brandt, arrival of the singer Scaria (Hagen) and visit from Frau Löper, back from Karlsbad. Herr Scaria sings somem of Hagen’s music straightaway, but since he knows nothing of the text, R reads it to him. Curious the dealings with these implements! -’

27 June 1876
‘Again 2nd act of S, again Herr Unger hoarse! Its impact greatly hindered in consequence. R and I both tired in the evening. Trouble with Herr Kögel (Hagen!), Gura has been chosen for Donner. - Things are said to be looking bad in Turkey.’

25 December 1877
‘Real brilliant sunshine, the first time for two months! R says to me, ‘Your birthday is my Sunday!’ He decides on a walk with the children before lunch, we go into the palace gardens, Siegfried’s new suit, in old Germanic style, gives us much pleasure. A merry meal, R solemnly proposes my health. In the evening the history of the Arabs again, after which R reads the first 3 cantos of the Divina commedia, to our great delight; then I ask him for something from Parsifal, and he plays Gurnemanz’s narration, the entry of Parsifal - divine blessings for my birthday!’

Heartbreaking day

‘I have always thought it would be unwholesome for me to attempt to write a diary. I’m sure it will make me think my life drab and strain after sensation to make copy for my autobiography.’ So begins a diary written during the First World War by Cynthia Asquith, described by some as one of the most fascinatingly beautiful women of her time. She died 50 years ago today.

There is a dearth of freely available information about Lady Cynthia Asquith on the internet. Wikipedia has a short entry, as does The Diary Junction; and the garish-looking Fantastic Fiction website has a bibliography. The Liberal England blog tells a cute story about how Lady Cynthia did in 1957 what Judith Keppel became famous for in 2000 - being an aristocrat and winning a big TV quiz prize!

Cynthia Charteris was born in 1887. In 1910 she married Herbert Asquith (the son of Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister at the time) and they had three children. She is most well known, perhaps, for being private secretary to the author J M Barrie and for inheriting a large part of his fortune. She herself wrote for children, as well as horror/fantasy stories, and books of reminiscences. She died on 31 March 1960 - half a century ago today.

At the suggestion of a friend, she began to keep a diary during the First World War. This was published by Hutchinson, but not until 1968, as Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries 1915-1918 - with a foreword by her lifelong friend L P Hartley. He wrote: ‘Lady Cynthia was one of the most fascinatingly beautiful women of her time - painted for love by McEvoy, Sargent, and Augustus John - and her lively wit and sensitivity of intelligence made her the treasured confidante of such diverse characters as D H Lawrence and Sir James Barrie, but when she died in 1960 she left a new generation to discover yet another of her gifts - as a rarely talented diarist. . .’

Hartley gives three reasons for the ‘value and fascination’ of
her diary: ‘Familiar figures cross her pages, often in ‘undress’, and a pulsing cross-section of the society of her time is shown. . . Secondly, the diary is also the story of the end of an era, symbolised perhaps in the curious anachronism of the Viceregal court in Dublin she describes with such delicious malice. . . And, finally, it is the unconscious analysis of a family and a woman’s identity - developing, maturing, changing, and almost completely breaking under the pressure of the most disastrous events that any generation had ever known.’

Here are a few extracts from Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries 1915-1918, starting with the very first entry.

15 April 1915
‘I have always thought it would be unwholesome for me to attempt to write a diary. I’m sure it will make me think my life drab and strain after sensation to make copy for my autobiography. I shall become morbidly self-conscious and a valetudinarian about my career, so I shall try not to be un-introspective, and confine myself to events and diagnoses of other people. In any case I am entirely devoid of the gift of sincerity, and could never write as though I were really convinced no other eye would ever see what I wrote. I am incurably self-conscious. This impromptu resolution sprung from an absurd compact I made with Duff Cooper [a British politician and writer] that we would both begin a diary at the same moment, and bind each other over to keep it up. He has given me this lovely book - but instead of inspiring, it paralyses me and makes me feel my life will not be sufficiently purple. . .’

15 April 1916
Margot [second wife of her father-in-law, the Prime Minister] had given me a hat of hers a few days before - too ugly to be seen dead in, and also much too small. I went into Jays to ask if they would change it, but to my humiliating embarrassment they said it must be at least three or four years old.

Lunched at Downing Street with . . . Great discussion about Pamela Lytton. I - in my opinion platitudinously, but in Elizabeth’s paradoxically - supported her claims to superlative charm, saying I should have married her if a man, etc. Elizabeth and the unnatural men there demurred. Jack Tennant admitted she had made his heart beat quicker, but didn’t endorse my good opinion of her intelligence. I said, ‘But, surely, you don’t want a woman to be good at political economy?’ - rather a floater, as that is exactly his wife’s forte! The PM, coming in late, warmly supported me, saying Pamela had had the greatest erotic success of her day and was the most accomplished ‘plate-spinner’. It is bad tactics on Elizabeth’s part to belittle in women just those assets she is without, scoffing at Pamela, Ruby, and other beautiful sirens. . .’

30 July 1916
‘Glittering, scorching day and the town teeming like an anthill. No signs of war, save for the poor, legless men whom Michael tried to encourage by saying, ‘Poor wounded soldiers - soon be better.’ There is no doubt that Brighton has a charm of its own, almost amounting to glamour. I am beginning to be quite patriotic about this end of the town - Kemp Town as it is called - in opposition to the parvenu Hove, which has less character and is to this rather what the Lido is to Venice.

We joined the children on the beach - painfully hot and glaring. We took them in a boat to try and get cooler. Beb and I bathed from the rather squalid bathing machines - perfect in the water, except for the quantity of foreign bodies. . .’

19 September 1916
‘Heartbreaking day. Came downstairs in high spirits, opened newspaper and saw in large print: ‘Lieutenant Asquith Killed in Action’. Darling, brilliant, magically charming Raymond [her brother-in-law] - how much delight and laughter goes with him! It seems to take away one’s last remains of courage. One might have known that nothing so brilliant and precious could escape, but after each blow one’s hopes revive, and one reinvests one’s love and interest. Now I feel I have really relinquished all hope and expect no one to survive.’