In this dirty war

‘They screamed and shouted, begging us not to kill them because they had family and kids back home. So what? As if, by contrast, we’d come from an orphanage into this shithole. We executed them all.’ This is one extract of several written by a Russian special forces officer active in the war against Chechnya and very recently published by The Sunday Times. Although the newspaper is now a pay-to-view website, several other organisations, not least The New York Times, have picked up the story, and made some of the extracts freely available online.

According to WaYNaKH online, an English-language Chechen website, the war in Chechnya has been ‘one of the world’s most brutal conflicts’. The Russians, it claims, abducted, tortured and executed suspected militants in extra-judicial killings - brazenly violating Russian and international law. Up to 200,000 Chechen people mostly civilians, it says, are thought to have died in the two periods of Russian occupation, the first of which began in 1994; and at least 5,000 Chechens simply disappeared. These wars were hidden from view, it adds, with access being severely restricted, especially on the Russian side where the most controversial, dangerous and secret work was carried out by the Spetsnaz - Russia’s elite special-forces units.

Indeed, The New York Times (NYT) accepts that Chechnya has seen some of the most severe forms of political violence of our time (but on both sides), much of which has been documented by human-rights investigators and a small number of journalists (one of these, Anna Politkovskaya, who kept a diary, was murdered in 2006). However, the NYT amplifies, accounts of participants have been few and far between. All the more valuable and extraordinary, then, is this new first-hand diary account published by The Sunday Times magazine on 31 October.

The diary extracts, penned by a senior Spetsnaz officer at the height of the Second Chechen War, in the years 2000-2004, appeared first in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Mark Franchetti, The Sunday Times’ Moscow correspondent since 1997, then translated the text into English for his article entitled, The War in Chechnya: Diary of a Killer. The NYT says the diary ‘offers a front-line account of characteristic forms of Russian-Chechen campaigns - roundups, torture, extrajudicial executions of detained rebels and the almost casual killing of civilians who happen to be in the way. It also captures some of the frantic energy and sorrow of firefights. . . The result is a portrait of confused dehumanization, of both relishing in fighting and agonizing over the results.’

Here are two extracts quoted by The New York Times:

‘We got hit from two sides crossing a settlement. Our commander told us to move faster, but we got hit anyway. We moved on, taking cover behind a row of houses, and could hear a firefight just ahead. Suddenly, my eye caught some shadows, one behind a window, the other at the entrance of a basement. I lobbed a hand grenade into the cellar, and sprayed the window with machine gun fire. When we walked up to check on the outcome we found two bodies, an old man and woman. Bad luck.’

‘Counterintelligence got wind of a group of female suicide bombers. We stormed their safe house and nabbed three women. One was in her forties, the others were young – one barely 15. They were drugged and kept smiling at us. The three were interrogated back at the base. At first, the elder, a recruiter of shahidkas [female suicide bombers], wouldn’t talk. That changed when she was roughed up and given electric shocks. They were then executed and their bodies blown up to get rid of the evidence. So in the end they got what they’d craved.’

More about the diary can be found at WaYNaKH.com websites. Here are several more quotes, as found on the WaYNaKH website:

‘Off to the scene of a firefight and a powerful blast. An APC had run over an improvised explosive device (IED). Five guys died and four were wounded. We went to look at the dead, laid out on a helicopter landing pad, in silence. The war has become much fiercer. We used to see the enemy and knew who we were firing at. Now, we wait to be shot at.’

‘All around us is treachery. And in this dirty war, of course, it’s the blood of ordinary soldiers, not that of the politicians who started it, that is spilt. They’re even scamming us out of our warzone wages [the bonuses troops are paid for time in battle]. Yet we keep carrying out these stupid orders, and keep coming back for more tours of duty. Each of us has his own reasons.’

‘We were sent to retrieve a heavy machinegun a detained Chechen had left behind during a firefight. We couldn’t find it. Enraged, I beat him up. He fell to his knees and cried, saying he couldn’t remember where he’d thrown the weapon. We tied him to the APC with a rope and dragged him around.’

‘I often think of the future. How much more suffering awaits us? How long can we go on for? What for? Maybe I should think of my own life, start living for my family, my children, my wife, who deserves a memorial for all the pain I’ve put her through. I’m 31. Maybe it’s time to unwind.’

The turkey we didn’t have

Tommy’s Peace, the second volume of diaries written by Thomas Cairns Livingstone, a Glasgow clerk in the first decades of the 20th century, has just been published by Mainstream Press. Though simply written and brief, the diary entries deliver a strikingly clear portrait of Tommy’s life, with wife, Agnes, often to be found in the wash house, and their son, also called Tommy, who got sick one Christmas because of ‘the turkey we didn’t have.'

Livingstone was born in Glasgow in 1882, and worked in the city as a mercantile clerk. He married Agnes, moved to the Govanhill area of Glasgow, and soon after, in 1913, began keeping a diary, not only writing daily entries, but often illustrating them with skilfully drawn cartoons. He continued with the diary habit for 20 years or so, and intermittently after that until his wife’s death in 1950. He himself died in 1964. The diaries were bought in a house clearance auction by Shaun Sewell, a trader in collectibles. He took them to the Antiques Roadshow, a TV programme during which experts comment on, and value, items brought by the public.

Gordon Wise, a literary agent with Curtis Brown, was watching the programme, according to an article in The Guardian, and noted Livingstone’s beautiful handwriting, and how the illustrations reminded him of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, a publishing hit in the 1980s. He soon stoked up interest among publishers for the Livingstone diaries, and Harper Collins won an auction for the rights. A first volume covering the years 1913-1918 - Tommy’s War - was edited by Glasgow historian Ronnie Scott and published in 2008. Now, Mainstream Publishing has brought out a sequel, also edited by Scott, with diary entries from 1919 to 1933, and a few from 1950.

Curtis Brown says: ‘Alongside engaging, warm-hearted recollections of everyday life with his wide circle of family, neighbours and friends, Thomas documents everything from the lingering effects of the war and post-war politics to cultural and social aspects of the era, including the rise of cinema and radio, the standard of dentists and opticians before the NHS, the partition of Ireland, the General Strike, the division of domestic labour, Clyde coastal holidays and the expansion of Glasgow. Yet, above all, Thomas affectionately chronicles family life with his hard-working wife, Agnes, and writes with pride of his clever young son, Tommy.’

The new volume - Tommy’s Peace - begins with a preface by the diary finder/owner, Shaun Sewell. Unfortunately, this is poorly written/edited. ‘The war had finally ended’, it begins, but then focuses too much on the first and earlier volume, not least with a sentence that makes no sense at all. Then there’s this bizarre comment, ‘Thomas centred his diary upon his own son, Tommy, who proved to be well worth the ink and paper.’ Moreover, Sewell seems intent on moralising: ‘Perhaps we should all be a bit more like Thomas in these testing times.’

The book is richly illustrated with Livingstone’s sketches - such as one of Tommy looking at his new stamp album - as well as some contemporaneous photographs. Apart from many useful annotations, Scott also includes several brief essays designed to give relevant historical and cultural contexts. Although the diary entries themselves are always short and repetitive, they are often amusing, and build-up to provide a colourful and clear picture of life in the Livingstone household. Here is that household at Christmas time, 90 years ago.

16 December 1920
‘Anticipated Christmas tonight by presenting Tommy with a stamp album. I polished the room brass work. Agnes busy about the room.’

17 December 1920
‘Isa here when I got home at tea time. I was pleased to see her so far recovered. Tommy went himself to the barber today. I also went all by myself. Tommy walloped into his stamp album at night.’

20 December 1920
‘Agnes in the washing house all day, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained, and it RAINED. Likewise, it was very cold. Not a good ‘drying day’, in washerwife talk. Unemployment getting very serious. Bread a farthing down today. Hallelujah!’

22 December 1920
‘Agnes still walloping about the room. I helped a little, a very little. Brought home a half bottle of the best. We had a small raffle in the office. I won.’

23 December 1920
‘Took a run up to the Mossmans, and on my way back dropped into Greenlodge. Isa keeping well, and at her work. Got home at 11.25 p.m. Addressed a few cards then.’

24 December 1920
‘Sent all our kind friends little messages of love today. This is Christmas Eve. Agnes gave me my tobacco for nothing. Isa phoned me today that Josephine’s shop had been broken into during the night and about £50 worth of goods stolen. She could not say if the place was insured. A serious loss indeed. Agnes finished the cleaning tonight. At least, I think it is finished.’

25 December 1920
‘Wishing you a merry Christmas. I have a whole holiday today. Took a walk over to Greenlodge in the forenoon to see what further news there was of the burglary. Nothing fresh. Had a look in at People’s Palace on way home. Had my usual Xmas dinner, then spent the afternoon taking in Xmas presents (maybe). Our total collection: two cards. We did not go to the pantomime this Xmas.’

26 December 1920
‘Went to church this morning, after my usual manner. Agnes got a touch of the cold and is a little fatigued after her labours, so she did not go out. After dinner I took a walk round the town. Tommy at Sunday School. Gave the clocks their final wind-up of the year.’

27 December 1920
‘We got a few more cards. We all went to the Majestic at night, seeing this is Boxing Day. Tommy troubled with a certain looseness of the bowels. It will be the turkey we didn’t have.’

GBS dines out

It’s sixty years to the day since the death of the great Irish playwright and social commentator, George Bernard Shaw, often called just GBS. He was a prolific and famous writer in his day, a celebrity in fact, and remains the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for Literature) and an Oscar (for the screen adaptation of his play Pygmalion). For a decade or so, when a young man, Shaw kept diaries, though they were lost for many years, and not published until the 1980s. A few extracts - that focus on his vegetarianism, and on the poet Shelley, a vegetarian hero of his - can be found online.

Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, the son of a civil servant. He had a haphazard education, but remained in Dublin after his mother had moved to London, and worked in an estate office. However, in 1876, he too moved to London to join his mother’s household, which provided him with enough money to live without working while he tried to become a writer. He wrote novels, which weren’t published, and ghosted a music column, before becoming more successful with his journalism, especially for Pall Mall Gazette. By the early 1880s, he had become a committed socialist, and was a charter member of the Fabian Society, formed to promote socialism, and a founder member of the London School of Economics.

Influenced by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose realist theatre shocked Victorian society, Shaw turned his attention to plays, the first of which were produced in the 1890s, plays such as Mrs Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man and Candida. By the end of the decade, he had established himself as a leading playwright. He had also married, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian. In 1906 they moved into a house, now called Shaw’s Corner, in Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Many significant plays followed in the period before the First World War - including Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Pygmalion - usually dealing with political, social or moral issues and almost always full of comedy and or verbal wit. And after the war, Shaw’s status as a playwright continued to grow with plays such as Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and The Apple Cart. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature; and in 1939 he won an Academy Award for adapting Pygmalion for a 1938 film screenplay directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard.

Although some of his later plays were overwrought with discussion and argument to the detriment of the drama, he remained a household name and public figure through to his 90s and his death on 2 November 1950 - sixty years ago today. For more biographical information see Wikipedia, British Library or the Nobel Prize or Spartacus Educational websites.

Between 1885 and 1897, Shaw kept a journal writing about his day-to-day life in brief and in a style of shorthand. However, these diaries were lost in his lifetime, and only resurfaced after the war in a bombed warehouse. Then, in the years before his death, they were partially transcribed by his long-time secretary, Blanche Patch. Thereafter, others were involved in the same task until Stanley Weintraub, one of the leading scholars on Shaw, completed, what Penn State University Press described as, the ‘definitive transcription of the Shavian shorthand, complete to the last ha’penny noted’. This was published by PSU Press in the mid-1980s, in two volumes with extensive annotations by Weintraub, as Bernard Shaw - The Diaries.

In the diaries, according to the PSU Press blurb: ‘We not only meet Shaw striving daily to make something of himself; we also encounter the people on the fringes as well as within the vortex of radical politics in late Victorian England. . . We also learn what it costs to buy a newspaper, get a haircut, ride the Underground [etc. and] about Shaw’s bedtimes (accompanied and unaccompanied), mealtimes (hasty and vegetarian, with only breakfasts at home), and his crowded life of conflicting appointments and activities often so overlapping as to cause him to miss many of them.’

An extensive collection of very brief (and doubly annotated!) extracts from the diaries can be found on the website of the International Vegetarian Union (IVU), which says this: ‘There were almost daily references to restaurants visited, showing that Shaw seems to have had no problem finding vegetarian food in London, where there were dozens of vegetarian restaurants - his only real problems were in Germany and Italy. He made very frequent visits to several vegetarian restaurants, detailed below, and to many other restaurants and cafes of varying quality, but never any mention of any problems with them.’

Here are a few extracts, which either focus on vegetarianism or on Shaw’s love of Shelley, who was also vegetarian. The first extract is as found on the IVU website (i.e with lots of annotations, some from the book, and some additional ones). The others are also from the IVU website, but without many of the annotations.

19 July 1885
‘Sunday. Joynes’s at Tilford. (9.5 train from Waterloo. - With the Salt’s and Joynes at Tilford. Bathed, tricycled, walked, played, sang and back at Waterloo at 21.45. (Henry Stephens Salt, ex-master of Eton, socialist, vegetarian, founder of the Humanitarian League, biographer of Thoreau [though most of that came a lot later] His attractive but lesbian wife Catherine, a sister of James Leigh Joynes, acted as occasional unpaid secretary for Shaw and enjoyed playing pianoforte duets with him on the Salt grand on his visits to Tilford.) [this is the first mention of Salt in the diaries, but it implies that they already knew each other well.]

6 July 1886
‘Cocoa etc. at Orange Grove’

10 February 1888
‘I unexpectedly made a row by objecting to a smoking concert.’ [Most vegetarians were anti-tobacco.]

6 November 1888
‘When I got to Birmingham I went to a vegetarian restaurant in Paradise St. and dined.’

13 March 1889
‘Read a paper on ‘Shelley’s Politics’ to the Shelley Society, at University College. . . worked all afternoon at the Shelley lecture. There were only half a dozen people there.’

10 January 1891
‘. . . we dined at the Porridge Bowl together.’

27 January 1891
‘. . . had tea together at the Aerated Bread Shop at the corner of Parliament Square.’

10 February 1892
‘Was commissioned by the Shelley Committee to take a hand in business of getting a cast for the performance of The Cenci.’ [This was to be a private performance of the Shelley play about incest which had been banned from public showing.]

6 August 1892
‘Worked so hard at the article on Shelley for The Albermarle in the train that I felt quite sick during the last 15 minutes of the journey.’

1 July 1893
‘Art and Literature Dinner at the Mansion House. Left the Mansion House with Norman, with whom I walked to Blackfriars. I could not eat; my feelings as a musician and vegetarian were too much for me; and save for some two or three pounds of ice pudding I came away empty.’

Thailand’s great ruler

King Chulalongkorn also known as Rama V, one of Thailand’s greatest rulers and reformers, died 100 years ago today. For much of his reign, and especially when travelling, he kept diaries. Recently, Ohio State University acquired rare copies of many of these diaries and launched a project to digitalise them. This has just been completed and they are now all available on the internet - but in the original Thai language.

Chulalongkorn was born in 1853, in Bangkok, the eldest son of King Mongkut. Because Chulalongkorn was still a minor when his father died in 1868, Si Suriyawongse, one of Mongkut’s closest advisers, was appointed regent until his coming of age in 1873. The young Chulalongkorn took the unprecedented step of travelling abroad - to Singapore, Java and British India - to observe European methods of administration, some of which he would later use to modernise his country.

King Chulalongkorn’s early reforms included the abolition of slavery, the closure of gambling houses, the establishing of an auditory office (to replace the corrupt tax system in place) and a privy council based on the British example. He also chartered a Council of State to act as a legislative body, though this proved ineffective and was later disbanded. His early years of rule were characterised by internal power battles, and having to deal with insurgencies on the borders with China. However, in time he set about wholesale administrative reforms, overturning the traditional methods that had been in place for centuries. He established a royal military academy to train troops in the Western fashion; he founded a Department of Education; and he implemented a title deed act confirming peasants’ claim to their land.

Thailand’s first railroad - from Bangkok to Ayutthaya - was opened in 1896. And it was also during Chulalongkorn’s reign that the traditional lunar system was replaced by the Western calendar, and that a modern system of coins and banknotes was introduced. He also declared religious freedom, allowing Christianity and Islam to be practiced in the Buddhist country. During his reign, Siam lost territory, now in Malaysia, Myanmar and Cambodia, but, by playing off Britain against France, he managed to preserve the country’s independence - confirmed by a convention, signed in 1896, guaranteeing Siam as a buffer state between British and French possessions.

According to Wikipedia’s biography, Chulalongkorn took four of his half-sisters (Mongkut’s daughters) as wives, and had 149 other consorts and concubines. Between them they bore him 33 sons and 44 daughters. He died a century ago today, on 23 October 1910 (a day commemorated with a national holiday). A few years later the country’s first university was founded and named in his honour - Chulalongkorn University. For more biographical information see Wikipedia or The Royal Thai Embassy (Singapore).

Earlier this month, Ohio University Libraries announced, via its Southeast Asia Collection Blog, that it had completed a project to digitalise 24 volumes of Chulalongkorn’s diary, spanning the years 1876 to 1887, as well as many more volumes of travel writings. These are all now available at Internet Archive - but only in the original Thai language. The project was funded or supported by the US Department of Education, the David K Wyatt Thai Collection, Digital Initiatives, Lyrasis, and Internet Archive itself.

King Chulalongkorn ruled the Kingdom of Siam with ‘a remarkable astuteness and foresight at a time of extraordinary danger and change in Southeast Asia’, the Blog explains, and his diary and travel writings ‘constitute one of the single-most important collections of primary sources on the period’. Even in Thailand these works are quite rare, it says, and accessible only to a handful of scholars.

Notwithstanding the Ohio Libraries information, there are some published editions of Chulalongkorn’s diaries which are still in print in Thailand and read today, such as the diary of his trip to Europe, Klai Ban (Far from Home), according to a feature on the King in the Pattaya Mail.

There appears to be no translations into English of Chulalongkorn’s diary or travel writing, but a review in English of a French translation of his diary or travel writing to Java in 1896 can be found on the Persee website. The review says of the translated text, ‘this is no dry-as-dust official memoir. Instead Chulalongkorn springs to life vividly from these pages as a perceptive and shrewd observer of the colonial scene as much at home amongst the frock-coated and bejewelled denizens of the ubiquitous Dutch clubs, as in the Kongsi of the Kapitan Cina [captains of Chinese enclaves] and the kratons [palaces] of the Central Javanese rulers.’

I complained to Chev

Julia Ward Howe died a century ago today. Little remembered, she was well known in her lifetime as a writer and social campaigner, particularly against slavery, and for the early women’s movement. Two biographies, ninety years apart in their writing, quote extensively from her diaries. Only the newer of the biographies, however, uncovers the extent of her domestic unhappiness.

Julia Ward was born in New York City in 1819, into an established New England family. Her father was a banker, and her oldest brother, Samuel, would marry into the wealthy Astor family. In 1843, the by now accomplished socialite married the serious Samuel Gridley Howe nearly 20 years her senior. He was a hero of the Greek war for independence (which had led to his being known as The Chevalier or simply Chev), and had become a pioneer educator of blind and handicapped children. They had five children that survived into adulthood, but the marriage was always strained.

In 1848, some of Julia’s poems appeared in anthologies, and in 1854 she published, anonymously, her own collection under the title Passion Flowers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the book seemed ‘to let out a whole history of domestic unhappiness. . . . What does her husband think of it?’ Indeed later, in her journal, she wrote: ‘I have been married twenty years today. In the course of that time I have never known my husband to approve of any act of mine which I myself valued. Books - poems - essays - everything has been contemptible in his eyes because not his way of doing things. . . I am much grieved and disconcerted.’

Julia continued to publish poems, as well as travel and biographical writing, and a play of hers was performed in 1857. During the 1850s, also, she was drawn into the anti-slavery movement, being a member of the short-lived Free-Soil Party. And when the civil war broke out, she joined the Sanitary Commission which had been formed to coordinate the volunteer efforts of women for the Union states. In 1862 The Atlantic Monthly published Battle Hymn of the Republic, an abolitionist hymn, for which she wrote the words, though not the music (composed by William Steffe in 1856). It was much sung during the war, and has remained a very popular American patriotic song - indeed, Wikipedia’s entry on the hymn is four or five times longer than the one on Julia herself.

In 1868 Howe founded the New England Women’s Suffrage Association, and the following year was involved in forming the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). And the year after that she was the first to proclaim a Mother’s Day. For the next 20 years, she co-edited AWSA’s magazine, Woman’s Journal. In 1898, she became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts. She died 100 years ago today on 17 October 1910. Further biographical information is available from the websites of The Celebration of Women Writers or The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.

A recent biography published by Continuum in 2006 - Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe by Valarie H Ziegler - quotes often from diaries kept by Julia intermittently. Ziegler says: ‘Diary entries in the 1860s and 1870s continued to disclose scenes of fierce family warfare - of children loyal to their father and furious with their mother, of a wife so distraught with her husband that every moment in his home was filled with agony.’ And here is one example:

‘Diary entries in November and December 1865,’ Ziegler says, ‘give further insight into the squabbles that marked the Howes’ domestic lives. Their lease on their Chestnut Street house - where Sammy [a sixth child] had been born and died - had expired, and Julia noted with sadness her last day in the house on November 3. By November 4, she was already unhappy with Chev’s behaviour in their new residence at 19 Boylston. Her diary noted that she “was very angry with Chev, who is carrying out his plan of putting a hearth & grate in the parlour, entirely against my wishes.” This was a prelude to the battle of the furnace that would transpire in December.

On December 18, Julia observed in her diary, “I complained to Chev this morning of the severe cold of the parlour, last evening, with no unkind intention.” Chev was not sympathetic. “He retorted furiously, saying that it was all my fault, the result of my want of system. I told him these repeated chills wd shorten my life.” Chev answered that dirt in the house would shorten his life. Julia had had enough. “I said, ‘it does not seem to.’ He left, and Maud cried, and Flossy attacked me most severely.” . . .

Julia’s diary December 19 recorded that she was “very melancholy on account of yesterday’s disagreement.” ’

Further on in Ziegler’s book (available for view on Googlebooks) there is an entertaining description of how three of Julia’s children squabbled over the writing of their mother’s biography. This was published in two volumes some 90 years earlier, in 1916, by Houghton Mifflin with the title - Julia Ward Howe 1819-1910. Laura E Richards and Maud Howe Elliott are credited with being the authors ‘assisted by’ Florence Howe Hall. The books are freely available online at Internet Archive (as well as on The Celebration of Women Writers website), and also include extensive quotes from Julia’s diaries. (According to Ziegler, though, Laura’s early drafts of the book contained even more diary extracts but they were edited out for being less entertaining than Julia’s letters.)

Here are several diary entries (as they appear in the 1916 biography) from the last days of 1866.

27 December 1866
‘Let me live until to-morrow, and not be ridiculous! I have a dinner party and an evening party to-day and night, and knowing myself to be a fool for my pains, am fain to desire that others may not find it out and reproach me as they discover it.

Got hold of Fichte [German philosopher] a little which rested my weary brain.

My party proved very pleasant and friendly.’

29 December 1866
‘I read last night at the Club a poem, ‘The Rich Man’s Library,’ which contrasts material and mental wealth, much to the disparagement of the former. I felt as if I ought to read it, having inwardly resolved never again to disregard that inner prompting which leaves us no doubt as to the authority of certain acts which present themselves to us for accomplishment. Having read the poem, however, I felt doubtful whether after all I had done well to read it in that company. I will hope, however, that it may prove not to have been utterly useless. The imperfection of that which we try to do well sometimes reacts severely upon us and discourages us from further effort. It should not.’

31 December 1866
‘Ran about all day, but studied and wrote also. “Farewell, old Diary, farewell, old Year! Good, happy and auspicious to me and mine, and to mankind, I prayed that you might be, and such I think you have been. To you have brought valued experience and renewed study. You have introduced me to Fichte, you have given me the honor of a new responsibility, you have made me acquainted with some excellent personages, among them Baron McKaye, a youth of high and noble nature; Perabo, an artist of real genius. . . You have taught me new lessons of the true meaning and discipline of life, the which should make me more patient in all endurance, more strenuous in all endeavor. You have shown me more clearly the line of demarcation between different talents, pursuits, and characters. So I thank and bless your good days, looking to the Supreme from whom we receive all things.

The most noticeable events of the year just passed, so far as I am concerned, are the following: the invitation received by me to read at the Century Club in New York. This reading was hindered by the death of my brother-in-law, J. N. Howe. The death of dear Uncle John. My journey to Washington to get Chev the Greek appointment. Gurowski’s death. Attendance at the American Academy of Science at Northampton in August. The editorship of the new weekly. My study of Fichte’s ‘Sittenlehre’ and the appearance of my essay on the ‘Ideal State’ in the ‘Christian Examiner.’ My reading at Lexington for the Monument Association. My being appointed a delegate from the Indiana Place Church to the Boston Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches. My readings at Northampton, Washington, and elsewhere are all set down in their place.

The bitter opposition of my family renders this service a very difficult and painful one for me. I do not, therefore, seek occasions of performing it, not being quite clear as to the extent to which they ought to limit my efficiency; but when the word and the time come together I always try to give the one to the other and always shall. God instruct whichever of us is in the wrong about this. And may God keep mean and personal passions far removed from me in the coming years. The teaching of life has of late done much to wean me from them, but the true human requires culture and the false human suppression every day of our lives and as long as we live.’

The Great Earl of Cork

It is 444 years to the day since the birth of Richard Boyle, the First and ‘Great’ Earl of Cork, a British entrepreneur and politician who made his name and his fortune in the British colony of Ireland. He had many children, several of whom became famous. He was also a diary writer, and left behind an extensive archive of papers, now held by the National Library of Ireland.

Boyle was born on 13 October 1566 in Canterbury, and studied at Cambridge and the Middle Temple. While still in his young 20s, he decided to seek his fortune in Ireland. There he obtained a legal, and financially lucrative, appointment; and, in 1595, he married Joan Apsley, from a wealthy Limerick family, though she died during childbirth a few years later. Having accrued land and wealth, he lost it during the Munster rebellion in 1598.

Boyle was oliged to return to London, where, after a while, he was imprisoned on charges of embezzlement concerning his past activities in Ireland. He was acquitted, and then returned to Ireland on being appointed by Queen Elizabeth I as clerk of the council of Munster.

In 1602, he bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s large holdings in Cork, Waterford and Tipperary (including Lismore Castle), and then set about improving the lands and businesses, creating trade and founding towns. He also married again, to Catherine Fenton, who bore him many children, including Robert Boyle, today called the father of modern chemistry, and Roger Boyle, a soldier and dramatist, who also kept a diary - see Height and raptures.

In 1620, Richard Boyle was created Earl of Cork, and in 1629, he was appointed one of the lord justices of Ireland. Two years later he became lord high treasurer. But then, in 1933, began a long conflict with Thomas Wentworth, the new lord deputy of Ireland, which led to a decline in Boyle’s privileges and in his income. Boyle patiently opposed Wentworth and his harsh rule, and later testified against him when brought to trial by Parliament.

Boyle died in 1643, having been chased off his lands during the Irish Rebellion of 1641. His sons, however, recovered the family estates after the suppression of the rebellion. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Peerage.

The National Library of Ireland holds a large Boyle family archive, called the Lismore Castle Papers - its catalogue runs to nearly 900 pages! Included are the diaries, letters and other papers of Richard Boyle. Many of these were first transcribed by Alexander Balloch Grosart, a Scottish clergyman and literary editor, over a century ago, and printed in 10 volumes for private circulation in the 1880s. They were titled The Lismore Papers, viz Autobiographical, Notes, Remembrances and Diaries of Sir Richard Boyle, First and ‘Great’ Earl of Cork.

All of the Grosart volumes are freely available at Internet Archive. Here is a sample of Boyle’s diary from early on in the first volume

1 March 1612
‘I agreed with mason John Hamon to fynish my outward gate of my house in yoghall & the chymney in my perler there; the stones being all hewed and made fytt before by my Irish mason; for which I paid him [. . .]’

3 March 1612
‘Captn Robert Tynt was married in my studdy in yoghall by my cozen Richard Boyle dean of Waterforde to my Kinswoman Mrs Elizabeth Boyle als. Seckerston widdow; and I gaue her unto him in marriadge, and I beseech god to bless them wth good agreement and many vertuous children.’

10 March 1612
‘I rodd to the assizes at waterforde.’

16 March 1612
‘The assizes began at yoghall.’

25 March 1612
‘I am to receave of Katulen ffitz gerrald of my tyeth money in Kerry [. . .] she hath not paid me.’

29 March 1612
‘I had a mortgage from Edward Walches great orchard over against my garden, and paid him other [. . .] for the release of his Interest in that garden, and in the North Abbey of yoghall; whereof I was in possession, at the perfecting his said assurance to me.’

A longer, and more accessible, entry from Boyle’s diary is available on the Library Ireland website in an article on Lismore Castle taken from the Dublin Penny Journal in 1833. This entry is dated just two months before Boyle’s death.

10 July 1643
‘This day the rebel Lieutenant, General Purcell, commanding again in chief, in revenge of his former defeat received at Cappoquin, reinforced his army to 7,000 foot, and 900 horse, with three pieces of ordnance, and drew again near to Cappoquin, and there continued four days, wasting and spoiling the country round about, but attempted nothing of any consequence. And when the 22d at night, that the Lord Viscount Muskrie came to the Irish army with some addition of new forces, they removed from Cappoquin in the night before my castle of Lismore, and on Saturday morning the 23d July, 1643, they began their battery from the church to the east of Lismore-house, and made a breach into my own house, which Captain Broadripp and my warders, being about 150, repaired stronger with earth than it was before, and shot there till the Thursday the 27th, and never durst attempt to enter the breach, my ordnance and musket shot from my castle did so apply them. Then they removed their battery to the south-west of my castle, and continued beating against my orchard wall, but never adventured into my orchard, my shot from my turrets did so continually beat and clear the curteyn of the wall. The 28th of July God sent my two sons, Dungarvan and Broghill, to land at Youghal, out of England, and the 29th they rode to the Lord of Inchiquins, who with the army were drawn to Tallagh, and staid there in expectation of Colonel Peyn, with his regiment from Tymolay, who failed to join, but Inchiquin, Dungarvan and Broghill, and Sir John Powlett, the Saturday in the evening (upon some other directions brought over by Dungarvan from his Majesty,) he made a treaty that evening with Muskrie and others, and the Saturday the 30th, they agreed upon a cessation for six days. Monday night, when they could not enter my house, they removed their siege and withdrew the ordnance and army - two or three barrels of powder - two or three pieces of ordnance of twenty-three pounds, and killed but one of my side, God be praised.’

When the battle rages

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ash Windham, a British soldier who distinguished himself in Crimea, served in India, and became commander of the British Forces in Canada. While in Crimea, he kept a diary which was published over a century ago and is now freely available online. This is the third diarist - after Edward Cooper Hodge and Florence Nightingale - connected to the Crimean War to be featured by The Diary Junction Blog.

Windham, the fourth son of Admiral William Windham, of Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk, was born on 8 October 1810. Educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he entered the Coldstream Guards at the age of 16. He served in Canada during Papineau’s rebellion against British treatment of French-Canadians, and rose through the army ranks to Captain and Lieut.-Colonel in 1846. In 1849 he retired on half pay and, in the same year, married Marianne Catherine Emily, daughter of Admiral Sir John Beresford.

On the outbreak of the Crimean War, Windham was appointed Assistant Quartermaster-General to the 4th Division, commanded by Sir George Cathcart and then Lord Raglan. He is best remembered for his part in the assault on Redan, one of the Russian fortifications at Sebastopol. Subsequently, he was appointed Governor of a part of Sebastopol. On returning to England, he was knighted, and served briefly as an MP, before being sent to Calcutta during the Indian Mutiny, where he defended the town of Cawnpore, and was in command of Lahore until his return to England in 1861. 

Windham was knighted in 1865, and married for a second time in 1866. The following year he sailed again to Canada to serve as commander of the British Forces there. He died at Jacksonville, Florida, in 1870. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has the only detailed biography of Windham online (though a subscription or library card is required for access). A little further information is available from the auctioneer Christies (which sold a vase given to Windham by his ‘friends in Warwickshire for his services during the Crimean War’)

In 1897, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner published The Crimean Diary and Letters of Lieut.-General Sir Charles Ash Windham, K.C.B with an introduction by Sir William Howard Russell. This is freely available online at Internet Archive, and is the source of the following extracts: the first three entries in the diary, and then two from a few weeks later (chosen because the dates match those of extracts used for the earlier blog article on Edward Cooper Hodge about the charges of the light and heavy brigades.

1 September 1854
‘Arrived at Constantinople this morning, and heard that the Army was embarking for Sebastopol, and would probably sail on the 3rd. The French and English have suffered severely from sickness in Bulgaria. For my part I never felt better, and I sincerely hope I may be preserved to return home; but, above all things, I do earnestly pray that God will grant me strength and courage to behave as becomes a man and a soldier, come what may. It will be my first battle, and no man can say what effect that may have on him, so I repeat that, above all things, I pray for a stout heart and a clear head when the battle rages fiercest, particularly should we be unsuccessful.’

2 September 1854
‘Anniversary of the death of a great English soldier, Oliver Cromwell. I wonder what he would do if at Varna? I had a long and interesting talk, last evening, after dinner with the General [Sir George Cathcart]. He told me all he intended doing, and I am convinced that he is perfectly right in his views.’

3 September 1854
‘Went on shore and saw Lord Raglan, Sir George Brown, General Airey, Admirals Dundas and Lyons. Drew some necessaries for servants and the detachment of the 46th Regiment, now on board here. I did what I could to find out what I had to do, but, as to this, got but little information. I was glad to see Lord Raglan looking so well, and as to General Brown, he looks the freshest man here; and I do not doubt he will lead the Light Division “like a good ‘un.” For my part, what I fear is the condition of the men. They are so dispirited and downcast by sickness that I very much question their fighting in the resolute way I am sure they would have fought had this expedition been undertaken months ago. I think that, from a strategical point of view, Odessa is the place to attack. Why we should choose to fight the Russians with a strong fortification to assist them, instead of fighting them with an open town near us that would probably offer no resistance, is more than I can understand. From what I can learn the French seem to be opposed to the attack (on Sebastopol); the English think it too late in the year, and a great many of our superior officers look upon it as hazardous and doubtful. And no one seems in the right spirit to do it. The French have lost a frightful number of men by sickness, and will only be able to embark twenty thousand ; we shall send twenty-two or twenty-three thousand, and I understand the Turks will send ten thousand. One thing is certain, we must all do our best.

25 October 1854
‘Horsford had just pointed out to me the confused masses of French upon the hill to our right, and I had just gone to point out the same to the General, when up galloped Captain Ewart, of the 93rd, and ordered us (the 4th Division) off to Balaclava. We got under arms immediately, and, on arriving at the scene of action, were informed that the Turks had run off to a man without firing a shot [a footnote by the Russell states: ‘This information was quite erroneous. The Turks defended No. 1 Redoubt very gallantly, and lost heavily’] running straight through our Cavalry Camp. The Russians instantly took possession of the position, but abandoned the greater portion of it on our approach. The cavalry instantly went into action, and the Heavy Brigade did very well. Unfortunately the Light Brigade was ordered to charge, and they did so gallantly; but, being received by three times their numbers and three batteries of artillery, besides riflemen, they got cut up and driven back, losing about half their number. The 4th Division got there just as this charge was being made, and the Russians abandoned two of the redoubts, retaining only the one furthest to the eastward. Captain Nolan, who took the orders to Lord Cardigan, was killed, charging at the head of the Light Cavalry. Although a good fellow, from all I can learn, his conduct was inexcusable. His whole object appears to have been to have a charge at the Russians at any cost ; but he could not have chosen a worse time. After the fight was over, and we had been pounded for the better portion of the day, we returned at night to camp, abandoning our original line as too extensive. My leg wonderfully painful all day, but I held on.’

26 October 1854
‘The Russians, rendered daring by their success against the Turks yesterday, made to-day a sortie against the 2nd Division. We (4th Division) turned out, but were not wanted, as the Russians soon beat a retreat, getting a handsome mauling, and losing 500 men in killed and wounded. They could not stand the fire, and, though they got up their guns, did not fire a shot with them. General Bosquet came down, but too late for the fun. I rode forward and joined the skirmishers of the 2nd Division for a few minutes. Leg still very bad.’

Diary briefs

Jimmy Carter’s White House Diary - Macmillan, The New York Times,

Marilyn Monroe’s Fragments - Macmillan, The Guardian

Lieutenant Wootton’s First World War diary - BBC

Tommy’s Peace: A Family Diary 1919-33 - Random House Group

Crew diaries reunited with vessel after 150 years - BBC

My dear little girl

Elizabeth Gaskell, a popular writer of socially realistic novels and ghostly short stories, was born 200 years today. For a while, before becoming a novelist, she tried keeping a diary. She wasn’t very good at it, managing only 11 entries in total, over five years. Nevertheless, the diary is an exceptional one, for it focuses exclusively on Gaskell’s observations, thoughts, uncertainties about, and love of, her baby daughter. In over two years of writing for The Diary Junction Blog, I do not recall any one of my 300 articles being about a diarist’s babies or his/her children’s development.

Elizabeth Stevenson was born on 29 September 1810, in Chelsea, the eighth and last of her parents’ children and only the second to survive infancy. Her mother died months after her birth, and baby Elizabeth moved to live with an aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. She visited her father, who remarried, rarely, and was sent away to school for a few years, but Knutsford always remained her home.

After her father died in 1826, Elizabeth spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne at the home of the Rev William Turner, a relation and a famous Unitarian minister who was a founder of the Literary and Philosophical Society. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he was humane, generous and eccentric, and ‘undoubtedly influenced her moral, humanitarian, and political outlook’.

In 1830, Elizabeth married William Gaskell, another Unitarian minister, and they set up home in Manchester, then a very depressed town. Her husband’s work drew her into direct contact with the poor, whom she helped in many way. Her first surviving daughter, Marianne, was born in 1834 and she had three more daughters (a son born in 1844 died before he was a year old).

Gaskell may have taken up writing as a relief from the sorry of her son dying, but in any case she completed her first novel in 1847 - Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life - which was published anonymously the following year, to great acclaim. Charles Dickens was impressed with the novel, for its social realism and tight plot, and subsequently published Gaskell’s work - including her next novel, Cranford, and her famed ghost stories - in his magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round.

In 1850, the Gaskells moved to Plymouth Grove, also in Manchester, where their house became the hub of a busy social circle. Visitors included John Ruskin, Mary Howitt, and Charlotte Brontë with whom Gaskell developed a particular friendship. When Brontë died in 1855, her husband urged Gaskell to write her biography, and this was published in 1857. In the 1850s, too, Gaskell started travelling, taking tours to European countries, usually without her husband but accompanied by one of her daughters.

Mrs Gaskell’s last and longest work - Wives and Daughters - was unfinished when she died in 1865 but published the following year. Further biographical information is available on The Gaskell Society website, or at Wikipedia. A detailed entry on Gaskell from the Dictionary of Literary Biography is available online at Tim Clement-Jones’s website.

Long before her first novel, Gaskell was dabbling in writing of various forms, and had had some poetry published. In March 1835, six months after her daughter Marianne was born, she took up writing a diary to record the baby’s growth and development. Even though the last entry is dated more than five years later, there are only 11 dated entries totalling no more than 20 published pages. The diary - a small notebook bound in marbled boards with spine and corner in calf - is held in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds. It was first published with the title My Diary in a limited edition of 50 by Clement Shorter in 1923.

Much more recently, in 1996, Keele University Press issued Private Voices - The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, edited by J A V Chapple and Anita Wilson. Gaskell’s diary is of interest, Anita Wilson says in her 30 page introduction, ‘as a document of Victorian social history and as a foreshadowing of her development as a novelist.’

Here are some short extracts from most of the 11 dates on which Gaskell sat down to write about her daughter, including the first, which is undated.

‘To my dear little Marianne I shall ‘dedicate’ this book, which, if I should not live to give it her myself, will I trust be reserved for her as a token of her mother’s love, and extreme anxiety in the formation of her little daughter’s character. If that little daughter should in time become a mother herself, she may take an interest in the experience of another; and at any rate she will perhaps like to become acquainted with her character in [its] earliest form. I wish that (if ever she sees this) I could give her the slightest idea of the love and the hope that is bound up in her.’

10 March 1835
‘The day after tomorrow Marianne will be six months old. I wish I had begun my little journal sooner, for (though I should have laughed at the idea twelve months ago) there have been many little indications of disposition &c already; which I can not now remember clearly. I will try and describe her mentally. I should call her remarkably good tempered; though at times she gives way to little bursts of passion or perhaps impatience would be the right name. She is also very firm in her own little way occasionally; what I suppose is obstinacy really, [though] that is so hard a word to apply to one so dear. But in general she is so good that I feel as if could hardly be sufficiently thankful, that the materials put into my hands are so excellent, and beautiful. [. . .]

Then as to her ‘bodily’ qualifications, she has two teeth cut with very little trouble; but I believe the worst are to come. She is very strong in her limbs, though because she is so fat, we do not let her use her ancles at all, and I hope she will be rather late in walking that her little legs may be very firm. I shall find it difficult to damp the energies of the servants in this respect, but I intend that she shall teach herself to walk, & receive no assistance from hands &c She lies down on the floor a good deal, and kicks about; a practice I began very early, and which has done her a great deal of good.

4 August 1835
‘It seems a very long time since I have written anything about my little darling, and I feel as if I had been negligent about it, only it so difficult to know when to begin or when to stop when talking thinking or writing about her. [. . .]

How all of a woman’s life, at least so it seems to me now, ought to have a reference to the period when she will be fulfilling one of her greatest & highest duties, those of a mother. I feel myself so unknowing, so doubtful about many things in her intellectual & moral treatment already, and what shall I be when she grows older, & asks those puzzling questions that children do? I hope I shall always preserve my present good intentions & sense of my holy trust, and then I must pray, to be forgiven for my errors, & led into a better course.’

4 October 1835
‘I see it is exactly two months since I last wrote in this book, and I hope my little girl is improved both in ‘body & mind’ since then. She suffered a good deal from the changes of weather we have had, and I have found it necessary to leave off milk as an article of diet at present. She lives on broth thickened with arrowroot, & I think this food strengthens her, but she is still a delicate child, and backward in walking.’

5 November 1836
‘There have been times when I have felt, oh! so cast down by her wrongdoing, and as I think I am very easily impressible, I have fancied there must have been some great mismanagement to produce such little obstinate fits, and whole hours of wilfulness. I do not however think that this has been often the case, and when it has, my cooler judgement has been aware of some little circumstance connected with her physical state that has in some measure accounted for it. For instance, she, (like her mother) requires a great deal of sleep.’

9 December 1837
‘I feel quite ashamed to see that more than a year has passed since I last wrote. There have been some sad excuses to be sure. I had very bad health period till my dear little Meta was born, February 5th 1837, and I had hardly recovered my strength when (March 10th) I received a summons to Knutsford. My dearest Aunt Lumb, my more than mother had had a paralytic stroke . . .’

25 March 1838
‘There is a new era in the little life of my dear little girl. Tomorrow she goes to an Infant School. I think I am naturally undecided, or rather perhaps apt to repent my decision when it is too late, but now I am beginning to wonder if I have done right about this darling. There is much to be said on each side . . .’

8 April 1838
‘Just a fortnight ago since I last wrote, and since that time I have had a sad fright about Marianne, on last Friday but one she had an attack of croup about 8 o’clock in the evening. We heard a cough like a dog’s bark. (She had had a cold in her head, and had seemed pale, and languid all day.) We gave her 24 drops of Ipec: wine, and Sam & Mr Partington both came. They said we had done quite rightly, and ordered some calomel powders.’

14 October 1838
‘I wish very much to make Marianne industrious; I am afraid I do not set her a good example. I try to employ her in making candlelighters, pricking pictures, counting out articles &c, but she is soon tired of any one employment. This must be struggled against for I can tell from experience how increasing an error this is.’

28 October 1838
‘She is a most sympathetic little thing. She tries to comfort me if she sees me looking sad, or thinks that anything has happened to discompose me. Her great faults are unaccountable fits of obstinacy; which are I hope diminishing and a want of perseverance and [dependence] upon others as to her occupations and amusements.’

The French Macdonald

Died all of one hundred and seventy years ago today, did the French Macdonald, or to give him his full title, Étienne Jacques Joseph Macdonald, the first Duc de Tarente. A favourite of Napoleon, Macdonald spent most of his life soldiering around Europe. However, as he approached 60, he decided to visit the homeland of his forefathers - the Western Isles - and while there he kept a diary. This was found recently, and then published in English by The Islands Book Trust. Although Macdonald was born in the Ardennes, France, in 1765, his father was a native of South Uist one of the Outer Hebrides, and from a Jacobite family loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie, and dedicated to restoring the exiled Stuart family to the British throne.

In 1785, Macdonald joined the French army. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Charles François Dumouriez, and distinguished himself at the Battle of Jemappes, but when Dumouriez deserted to the Austrians, Macdonald refused to do the same. He rose quickly through the French Revolutionary army ranks, serving in the army of the Rhine and in Italy, where he occupied Rome, and was made governor. Thereafter, in conjunction with another general, Jean Étienne Championnet, he took the Kingdom of Naples, which became known as the Parthenopaean Republic.

In 1800, Macdonald received command of the army in the Helvetic Republic, maintaining communications between the armies of Germany and of Italy, and won Napoleon’s praise for a winter crossing of his army into Italy. On returning to Paris, MacDonald married the widow of General Joubert, and was appointed French ambassador to Denmark, a position he did not hold for long. Caught up in ante-Napoleon intrigues, he was ostracised for some years, and not recalled to active duty until 1809 when Napoleon judged his military talents indispensable.

Soon after being recalled he helped defeat the Austrians at Wagram and was made a Marshal of France, and given the title Duc de Tarente in the Kingdom of Naples. Macdonald continued to serve in Austria, then in Catalonia, and spent some time defending Riga during the Russian campaign. In 1813, during the German campaign, he was ordered to invade Silesia, where he suffered a heavy defeat; another defeat followed at Leipzig which he barely escaped with his life.

When Napoleon abdicated, in April 1814, Macdonald, loyal to the last, was directed by Napoleon to give his adherence to the new regime, and subsequently served under Louis XVIII, though accepted no posting during Napoleon’s return and the so-called Hundred Days. He was appointed major general of the Royal Guard, and was named to the Legion of Honour. He died on 25 September 1840 - 170 years ago today. See Wikipedia for more information or the International Napoleonic Society website.

In 1825, Macdonald travelled to Scotland, the home of his forefathers, and kept a diary on the journey. This was found in the French National Archives not so long ago, and translated from the original French by Jean-Didier Hache. The French Macdonald was published by The Islands Book Trust in 2007, and then reprinted earlier this year. The publisher says: ‘This fascinating document, ignored for generations and containing some very frank observations on people he met from Sir Walter Scott to his MacDonald forebears in the Hebrides, . . gives an intimate account of a vanished society and a unique insight into the fabric of nineteenth century Scotland.’

Ron Ferguson reviewing the original publication for The Press and Journal includes some (undated) extracts. The first is about Walter Scott; and the second is about visiting the caves of Corrodale, where his father had been in hiding with Bonnie Prince Charlie.

‘At 7 o’clock, dinner at MacDonald Buchanan’s, where I meet Sir Walter Scott. He is 55 years old, but looks 60. His face is handsome and fresh, but cold. Head as that of Titus, sparse hair, white, same as the eyebrows; small and witty eyes, height 5 feet and 6 to 7 inches. He limps, from an accident sustained during his youth. We swap a few compliments. He speaks French well. I was told he does not admit to the authorship of any of the books published under his name, and I am advised to speak only vaguely about it.’

‘It is in this cave that I was told an anecdote which I often heard from my father in my youth. The Prince needed a knife, but it had been forgotten. He asked my father to find one. My father pointed out to him the risks of such an errand, but he insisted and made it an order. Thus, in this unfortunate situation, he still acted as if he were the King.’

Marc Horne, writing for The Sunday Times about the reprinted edition last April, also included some extracts.

‘The countryside between Berwick and Dunbar is all even drearier and monotonous than that which we saw at the last stage posts: meagre cultivations, barren slopes and isolated trees which the northern wind has crippled before they could develop.’

‘The apartments [at the palace at Hollyrood] look shabby and the furniture even more so. The view is grim. The guide does not know anything.’

‘Women and girls walk with their bare feet, holding their shoes in their hands even within towns. I have discussed this custom with various people who were equally critical of it.’

Father of Mormon history

The diaries of the late Leonard J Arrington, known as the ‘Father of Mormon History’, are to be formally opened today when two of his children deliver an annual lecture on Mormon history in Logan, Cache County, Utah. The diary reveals in gritty detail, they say, not just his own ‘adventures’ as a historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the history of many Cache Valley characters. It does not, though, by newspaper accounts dwell on his disappointment when the church decided to close down his era of open and academic research into its history.

The third of eleven children, Arrington was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 1917 to parents who were Latter-day Saints and farmers. He studied agricultural science and then agricultural economics at Idaho University, before moving to postgraduate work at the University of North Carolina. In 1942, he married Grace Fort; and during the Second World War, between 1943 and 1946, he served for the US army in North Africa and Italy. He completed a doctorate in economics from the University of North Carolina in 1952, which subsequently led to the publication of his Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900. For nearly 30 years, until 1972, he was professor at Utah State University in Logan, and then he was appointed Lemuel H Redd Jr Professor of Western American History at Brigham Young University until 1987, when he retired.

In addition to his university academic career, Arrington was keen on historical associations. He helped establish the Mormon History Association in 1965, serving as its first president. In 1972, he was appointed official Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During his time in this position he opened up the archives, and sponsored the writing of histories in an academic style. Some considered this an idealistic approach, and in 1982 his open era was brought to an end when the church transferred the history division he had created to Brigham Young University. Arrington also launched the Western Historical Quarterly; and he served for short terms as presidents of the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. He was made a Fellow of the Society of American Historians in 1986.

After Grace died, he remarried to Harriet Horne in 1983. He published a number of books in his life - including The Mormon Experience: a history of the Latter-Day Saints; Brigham Young: American Moses; Adventures of a Church Historian; and History of Idaho - as well as several collections of lectures. He died in early 1999, and in 2002 was posthumously awarded the first annual Lifetime Achievement Award by the John Whitmer Historical Association. Further biographical information is available from FairMormon or Wikipedia.

Today, at the Logan Tabernacle, two of Arrington’s children are delivering the annual Arrington Mormon History Lecture. This will mark the formal opening of an archive at Utah State University - closed for 10 years after his death - with Arrington’s voluminous diaries. Publicity for the lecture says: ‘The diary reveals in gritty detail not just his adventures as a church historian, but the history of many Cache Valley characters. It also provides a treasure-trove of information on his personal trials, triumphs, and disappointments, along with his joys as a friend, father, and scholar. This presentation provides a sampler of stories, hidden deeds, private opinions about public controversies, and insights into a man who was hailed variously as a genius, a dangerous menace, a valiant friend, and a wise father.’

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Arrington was ‘Mormonism’s most influential historian of the late 20th century’, and his diary ‘reveals a life imbued with the sense that he was chosen by heaven to help the LDS Church and its people truthfully tell the Mormon story’. However, the diary ‘is not a juicy trove of gossip’ the paper adds, nor does it dwell on the writer’s disappointment with his treatment by the church. Rather, historian Ronald W Walker says, the diary is ‘an annal of the intellectual life. . . [and] an extremely important historical document in terms of life, letters and thought in the 20th century.’

Here is one extract from Arrington’s diary, thanks to the The Salt Lake Tribune article: ‘Our great experiment in church-sponsored history has proven to be, if not a failure, at least not an unqualified success. . . One aspect that will be personally galling to me will be the gibes of my non-Mormon and anti-Mormon friends: ‘I told you so!’ ’

Matinée Poétique writer

The diaries of the late writer Takehiko Fukunaga have just been released to the media for the first time, according to Japanese newspapers. The diaries, which date from the 1940s, are said to give an insight into his delicate way of depicting human pain and suffering. 

Not translated into English, and not well known in Europe, there is very little information about Fukunaga on English-language websites. A listing in Japan Encyclopedia, partly available on Googlebooks, says ‘she’ - even though he was a man! - was born in Fukuoka in 1918. He translated some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s works, and wrote a critique of Paul Gauguin for which he won an award.

A little more information is available from a website called DeadMansBrain which says Fukunaga was fond of French poets such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont, but was especially influenced by Baudelaire. With Shin’ichiro Nakamura, Shuichi Kato and others, he formed a literary coterie called Matinée Poétique. And while striving to introduce European literary trends, he wrote experimental novels such as Fudo (Climate) and Meifu (The Nether World). He also wrote detective novels under the pen name Reitaro Kada. In 1972 he won the Japan Literature Grand Prize, for Shi no shima (Death Island). He died in 1979.

The Mainichi Daily News has now reported that three of Fukunaga diaries - written between 1945 and 1947 - have been released to the media for the first time. It claims that they shed light on the roots of his style of writing, one that ‘delicately depicts the pain and the suffering of humans’. The diaries were found by a researcher 10 years ago, but their release was opposed by Yamashita Sumi, Fukunaga’s ex-wife (also known as the poet Akiko Harajo). It is several years, however, since Sumi’s death, and their son, Natsuki Ikezawa, also a poet, has decided to make the documents public; and extracts are being published in Shincho literary magazine.

In his journals, The Mainichi Daily News says, Fukunaga writes about his love for his wife and newborn son, expresses enthusiasm for launching a new literary journal in collaboration with Kato, and describes the chaos of postwar Japan. In other parts of the diaries, though, he writes about the difficulties with his wife and his suffering from tuberculosis. According to literary critic Akimasa Kanno, it is these difficulties that must have allowed him to dig deep into the concepts of love, loneliness and death - the central theme of his literature. ‘The diaries are very important materials,’ he added.

The Mainichi Daily News quotes only a couple of very short extracts: ‘It’s already been 50 days since Natsuki was born. His innocent smiles hold me back’; and ‘I fear my disease. I’m worried about Sumiko, and think about the past and the future.’

Porfirio Díaz rebels

Today is the 180th anniversary of the birth of Porfirio Díaz, a giant, if somewhat controversial, figure in Mexico’s history. He ruled the country for the best part of 30 years, but most of it as a tyrant, and was only brought down by the Mexican Revolution (which started 100 years ago). Although there are no published diaries (at least in English) written by Díaz, one biography, freely available online, quotes extensively from such diaries. It also worth noting another anniversary - tomorrow - the bicentenary of the start of the Mexican War of Independence.

Descended from both Mixtec Indians and Spaniards, José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori was born on 15 September 1830 in Oaxaca to parents who kept a small inn. However, his father died three years later, and the young Díaz learned carpentry and shoemaking outside of school to help with the family income. At 13, his mother sent him to study for the priesthood, but at 16 he joined a local militia.

He fought with the Mexican army against the US in the mid-1840s, and then, with the encouragement of the Liberal Benito Juárez (who went on to become President in 1858), he studied law for a while. In 1854, he became something of a rebel helping an imprisoned friend, and voting against the President (see below). He went into hiding, but benefited from much support in the Oaxaca region. By 1856, he had been promoted to captain in the state national guard. Subsequently, he had a distinguished military career, fighting in the War of Reform and then against the French in the 1860s.

After returning to Oaxaca, he again became dissatisfied with the governing regime and led protests and then an unsuccessful revolt in 1876. He fled to the US but returned six months later to roundly defeat the government at the Battle of Tecoac. In May 1877, he was elected President. Díaz’s first term in office was noted for his efforts at building a power base and his suppressing of revolts. Having supported a no re-election policy earlier, though, Díaz decided not to stand for a second term himself, but instead hand-picked his successor. It was a period of administrative confusion, and Mexicans re-elected Díaz to the Presidency again in 1884. Thereafter, he didn’t relinquish power for a quarter of a century. Encyclopaedia Britannica says during this time he ‘produced an orderly and systematic government with a military spirit. He successfully consolidated the nation by what many referred to as a centralised tyranny.’

During the years Díaz ruled Mexico, known as the Porfiriato, foreign investment was strongly encouraged, and led to much new infrastructure and enterprise. However, the wealth created in these decades was not fairly distributed with most of it going abroad or into the hands of very few rich Mexicans. By 16 September 1910, the date usually given for the start of the Mexican Revolution, the economy had declined, and national revenues were sinking. Moreover, rural poverty, strikes and discontent were endemic. Díaz finally resigned in May 1911, and went into exile in France, where he died in 1915. He married twice, and had three children. For more biographical information see Latin America Studies or Wikipedia.

Although there’s no trace of any published diaries in English, there is one biography of Díaz, by Ethel Tweedie (often referred to as Mrs Alec Tweedie), published in 1906 which, apparently, makes extensive use of Díaz’s diaries. Ethel Tweedie was rather an extraordinary woman who travelled widely and found a ready market for her jolly travel books such as Girl’s Ride in Iceland (1889), A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894) and Through Finland in Carts (1897). Journeying further away, she went to China, Russia, the US and spent considerable time in Mexico, where she became friendly with Díaz’s wife who helped win her husband’s endorsement for a biography.

This was published in 1906 by John Lane Company in New York as The Maker of Modern Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, and by Hurst and Blackett in London as Porfirio Díaz, Seven Times President of Mexico. Both (identical) versions are freely available at Internet Archive.

Tweedie says in her introduction that ‘General Díaz honoured me by handing over long extracts from his diaries’, and ‘no part of this diary has hitherto been published’. Somewhat obsequiously, she also says this: ‘That President Díaz was the greatest man of the nineteenth century is a strong assertion, but those who read these pages will, I hope, think so too.’

Unfortunately, in her biography, Tweedie never gives any dates for the many ‘diary’ extracts she quotes. Also, many of the extracts read as though they were written in retrospect. Nevertheless, here are some of those ‘diary’ extracts.

In 1854, Don Marcos Pérez, a former teacher of Díaz, was arrested and imprisoned in a turret of the Convent of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca. Díaz explains how, aided by his brother Félix, he managed to enter his friend’s cell:

‘The window was closed, and in the upper part of the solid shutters were two small openings, each with an iron cross in the centre. In the door of the turret was a small wicket, rather lower than the full height of a man, through which the sentinel, stooping down, could from time to time watch his captive. There was a second outer door, and in the passage between the two were the sentinel and a corporal. This second door was, like the first, closed and locked. The guard consisted of fifty men, under a captain and a superior officer. All were perfectly sure that the prisoner could not effect an escape, for his cell had only the one door and the windows. When I had been lowered by a rope to the window and the sentinel showed himself at the little wicket, I had to stoop down, sliding below the sill as far as possible so as not to be seen. Thus I hung, suspended by the rope which my brother Félix held from the top of the roof. In spite of many difficulties and dangers, we succeeded on three separate nights in speaking with Don Marcos Pérez.’

Having been able to communicate with Pérez, Tweedie says, Díaz was then able to help obtain his freedom.

In that same year, in 1854, Antonio López de Santa Anna (General Santa Anna) was in the last of his eleven terms of office. He had become an army cadet in 1810, just a few months before the War of Independence - generally considered to have started on 16 September. He first became President in 1833. Here is Díaz explaining how he came to oppose the President that year.

‘The dictatorial, retrograde politics of General Santa Anna, and his persecution of the Liberals, occasioned a reaction in the country . . . The Revolution was headed by General Don Juan Alvarez, a full-blooded Indian, who was one of the few leaders of the War of Independence still surviving. Soon after its inception Santa Anna, imitating the example of Louis Napoleon - whom he flattered himself he resembled in more ways than one - sought to obtain a demonstration in his favour, and ordered a popular vote to be taken which should decide who should exercise the supreme Dictatorship.

I was filling the post of Professor of Law, when the Director of the Institute . . . called all the professors together on the 1st of December, 1854, to vote in a body for Santa Anna. I refused, thinking that during the voting there would be some scandalous incident which would justify recourse to arms, and hoping that I might perhaps find an opportunity to be of use. This, however, was impossible, since the Government had posted, a strong guard of troops in the plaza, and had even brought up cannon. I went to the porch of the Palace where the votes were being taken.

General Don Ignacio Martinez Pinillos, who was Governor and Military Commander of the State of Oaxaca - or Department, as it was then called - was presiding at the poll within the Palace.

The head of the division in which I lived, Don Serapio Maldonado, presented himself, saying that he voted on behalf of various individuals who were residents in his division for the continuance in power as Supreme Dictator of General Santa Anna. Then it was I appealed to the President myself to discount my vote from the number, because I did not wish to exercise the right of voting.

At that moment the academical body of the Institute arrived, and all the professors voted in favour of Santa Anna, and gave their respective signatures to the roll.

When this was done the Licentiate Don Francisco S. de Enciso, who was Professor of Civil Law, asked me if I was fully determined not to vote. I answered in the same terms in which I had excused myself to General Martfnez Pinillos, saying that voting was a right which I was free to exercise or not.

‘Yes,’ answered Enciso, ‘and one does not vote when one is afraid!’

‘This reproach burnt into me like fire, and made me seize the pen which was again proffered me. Pushing my way between the electors I passed up the room and recorded my vote, not for Santa Anna, but in favour of General Don Juan Alvarez, who figured as chief of the Revolutionary movement of Ayutla.’

This unexpected incident, Tweedie says, aroused general consternation and uproar. In the excitement of the moment young Diaz passed out of the voting hall unobserved, and disappeared in the crowd in the plaza of Oaxaca. Orders were immediately issued for his pursuit and arrest. In the meantime he had grasped a rifle, mounted his horse, and, accompanied by another resolute companion, got away, riding down those who would have barred his passage.

The might of genius

William Holman Hunt, one of the most prominent members of the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters, died a century ago today. His artistic development was much influenced by religion and travelling in the Holy Land. On his first trip there, he kept a journal which, although not published, is sometimes discussed in biographical texts. However, the diary of another painter, Ford Madox Brown, closely associated with the Brotherhood, has been published, and it refers to Hunt, as well as his talent, in glowing terms.

Hunt was born in 1827, in the City of London, his father being warehouseman for a cotton spinning and threadmaking company. As a teenager, he had various clerical jobs around the City, but he was also painting when he could. In 1844, he was given a permit to paint in the National Gallery, which is where he met John Everett Millais, who encouraged him to apply for the Royal Academy Schools, and who became a life-long friend. While at the Royal Academy, Hunt was strongly influenced by the writing of John Ruskin, the art critic.

In 1848, Hunt became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and at the end of August moved out of a studio he shared with his teacher, Ford Madox Brown, to share one with Hunt. By the end of the same year, Rossetti and Hunt with Millais had formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Initially, Hunt’s works did not find favour with the public, but his popularity increased when, in 1854, Ruskin championed a work called The Light of the World. Also in 1854, Hunt left for a long journey to Syria and Palestine in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for further religious works. There he painted The Scapegoat, a solitary animal on the shores of the Dead Sea.

In 1865 Hunt married Fanny Waugh, and the following year they left England to go East, but a cholera outbreak led them to settle for a while in Florence, where Fanny gave birth to a son, Cyril Benoni, before dying of a fever. Thereafter, Hunt returned to London, but often travelled to Florence, and took several other extended trips to Jerusasalem, latterly with his second wife, Edith (Fanny’s sister). The Triumph of the Innocents, May Morning on Magdalen Tower, and The Miracle of the Sacred Tower are among the more important of his later works. His eyesight began to fail in the late 1890s, after which he worked more enthusiastically on an autobiography, which was published in 1905. He died on 7 September 1910.

Although Hunt was not a committed diarist, he did write two journals during his journey to the Middle East in the mid-1850s - one about 250 pages long covering much of the year 1855, and the other only about 16 pages while painting The Scapegoat. These are held by The John Rylands University Library in Manchester, and are occasionally quoted in biographical texts about Hunt. Deanna Victoria Mason discusses Hunt’s journals in her PHd thesis for Queen’s University, Ontario, (which is available online) - The Perennial Dramas of the East - Representations of the Middle East in the Writing and Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

And Liverpool Museum’s website says this about The Scapegoat (held by the Lady Lever Art Gallery): ‘In the Book of Leviticus (which is quoted on the frame) the goat is said to bear the iniquities into a land that was not inhabited. Hunt chose to set his goat in a landscape of quite hideous desolation - it is the shore of the Dead Sea at Osdoom with the mountains of Edom in the distance. In his diary Hunt described this setting as ‘a scene of beautifully arranged horrible wilderness’ and he saw the Dead Sea as a ‘horrible figure of sin’, believing as did many at this time that it was the original site of the city of Sodom.’

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription or library card required) quotes a short extract from Hunt’s diary dated November 1854: ‘I regard my occupation as somewhat akin to that of the priests.’ The Persian Carpet guide has this: ‘On his first visit to Jerusalem, 1854-6, Hunt had rented a house inside the city gates. In his diary writing of 7th April 1855 he wrote about his visit to the Dome of the Rock, and professed himself ‘fairly overwhelmed with the solemn beauty’ of the interior. ‘All is sombre, so that at first one can scarcely make out the design - a circle of graceful pillars supporting the dome and an octagonal space without. The inner circle is shut in with a screen and is entered by ascending two or three steps: here one is shown the extensive surface of the natural rock where Abraham offered Isaac on which the Temple was erected.’

One important source of information about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, edited by Virginia Surtees and first published in 1981 by Yale University Press. Brown is best known for historical/biblical paintings and frescoes, including a series of 12 murals for Manchester Town Hall - see The Diary Junction for a little more information. Here are a few extracts from his diary about Hunt.

31 August 1848
‘Set to work about 12 till 2 & from 3 till 4 at the architecture. Rosetti called with Hunt, a clever young man.’

16 January 1855
‘Yesterday [Thomas] Seddon came back after 20 months of absence, looking thinner & genteeler than ever & in high spirits. I went with him to Kentishtown leaving my work just begun. His pictures are cruelly P.R.B.’d. I was very sorry to see he had made less than no progress. . . Hunt, he tells me, gave him no advice at all, he has been prepossessed against him I fear, it is a great pity. There is no better hearted fellow living nor a truer gentleman.’

15 March 1856
‘Up late, to work about 1 till half past 3 then to see [Alfred] Stevens & Hunt & [Henry] Holliday. Stevens picture a progress evidently. Hunts are without doubt the finest he has done yet. The Christ & Mary in the temple is one of the grandest works of modern times & the lantern maker also is a lovely little work, but ill drawn. Hunt as at last decided against private exhibiting again so that is all knocked at head after so much jaw on his part about it.’

19 May 1856
‘. . . to the R.A. Went over it all, catalogue in hand from No. 1 to the End. Very little good, only 3 historical works & they not good. . . Hunt & Millais unrivalled, except by [James Clarke] Hook how for colour, indescribable charm, is pre-eminent even to hugging him in ones arms. A perfect poem is each of his little pictures. Millais’ look ten times better than in his room owing to contrast with the surrounding badness. Hunts Scape goat requires to be seen to be believed in & only then can it be understood how by the might of genius out of an old goat & some saline incrustations can be made one of the most tragic & impressive works in the annals of art.’