The friends of liberty

Joseph Hunter, a little remembered Yorkshire antiquarian, died 150 years ago today. He started to keep a diary with some determination - perhaps to follow the example of Ralph Thoresby, another antiquarian who lived a century earlier - but doesn’t seem to have continued keeping it for long. Nevertheless, it provides some illuminating detail for those who study the history of reading.

Hunter was born in 1783 in Sheffield, the son of a cutler. Educated at Attercliffe, he later studied theology at New College in York, becoming a Presbyterian minister in Bath in 1809. He married Mary, daughter of Francis Hayward, and they had six children, of whom three sons and a daughter survived Hunter himself. A long-term interest in antiquarian studies led him to be appointed, in 1833, a sub-commissioner of the Records Commission to London. Five years later, he became an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records. He wrote much on history and archaeology.

After his death - on 9 May 1861 - a large number of his manuscripts became the property of the British Museum, the most important of which is a volume of some 650 pages completely filled with pedigrees of families based in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cheshire, and Lancashire. Wikipedia and the website of St Mary’s Parish Church, Ecclesfield, have short biographies.

Early on in his life, when only 23, Hunter decided to become a diarist, but he left behind less than a year’s worth of entries. Arthur Ponsonby, author of English Diaries, describes Hunter’s diary thus:

‘He notes the lectures he attends, the people with whom he has conversations and to whom he writes letters, sermons he hears, the establishment of ‘a society of literary conversations’ where they have a debate on a universal language; an attack of a severe cold (‘believe t’is epedemic and what is called influenza’) a tea-party where the conversation is ‘merest chit chat and scandal,’ etc. It would almost seem as if he were settling down to be a diarist when he begins describing people, for instance George Dyer, ‘a strange quizz, such a rough head of hair was never seen, but an entertaining fellow, takes snuff to wean himself from smoking.’ But after recording immense lists of books he is reading he breaks into a sort of shorthand just to give the division of the day, every hour of which is occupied in the study of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, etc. and on September 20 he leaves off for good.’

Stephen Colclough, however, in his essay entitled Readers: Books and Biography contained within A companion to The History of the book edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathon Rose (published by Blackwell in 2007) makes good use of Hunter’s diary. Here are several paragraphs from his essay (available at Googlebooks).

‘. . . Institutions of reading (such as subscription libraries) helped to shape individual reading practices by encouraging the public discussion of texts. Several readers who were members of such institutions left records of their readings. The diaries of one such reader, Joseph Hunter, reveal that it was possible for a member of such an institution to interpret text in ways that were fundamentally opposed to the rules that governed their reading community.

During the late 1790s, Hunter was a member of the Surrey Street Library in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Surrey Street was a subscription library owned by its members. Members were charged an annual fee of one guinea, and both they and the books that they ordered had to pass the scrutiny of the library committee to be admitted. As Hunter records, he made frequent trips to the library to borrow a wide range of texts, including novels and magazines. The Analytical Review was a particular favourite, and he made notes on its contents and read texts, such as Robinson’s The Causes and Consequences of English Wars (1798), reviewed in its pages. However, in the autumn of 1798 the committee decided to remove many of the texts associated with the contemporary radical movement from its shelves. As Hunter noted on October 31, 1798: ‘[I] brought the 2nd number of the Anti-Jacobin Review & Magazine, which is got into the Surry Street Library instead of the Analytical which they have turned out. It is a most virulent attack upon all the friends of liberty or jacobins, as they are pleased to stile them; it is ornamented with caricature prints’.

Conservative writers viewed the Analytical as an important source of opposition to the war that Britain was fighting against France in the 1790s. . . The library committee may well have excluded the Analytical because it wanted to disassociate itself from opposition to the war against France, but the effect on Hunter was to make him aware of his own position as a member of an audience that was under attack. He is referring to himself as one of the ‘the friends of liberty’ in this passage from the diary, and it is from this position that he completed an oppositional, or resisting, reading of the contents of the Anti-Jacobin.

As this example suggest, Hunter’s diaries provide an important account of both the range of his reading (which included everything from ephemera to novels) and of the variety of strategies that he used to make sense of the texts. He even noted the presence of posters for political meetings in the streets and that he had seen men reading seditious periodicals at work. Such autobiographical documents are an important source of information about how texts were used. They provide vital evidence about reading as an everyday practice (sometimes passive, sometimes, as in his reading of the Anti-Jacobin, resisting) that cannot be recovered from inert sources such as publisher’s records. Hunter’s diary records that he was exceptionally well read in contemporary texts, but he was also exposed to older texts which he borrowed from his guardian or bought second-hand.’

Finally, it is also worth noting that Hunter edited and prepared for publication the diaries of Ralph Thoresby, another northern antiquarian who was born more than century earlier than himself. (See The Diary Junction for details.)

Royal wedding - Prussian style

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Sir George Jackson, a 19th century diplomat of quiet distinction. Though little-remembered today, his diaries and letters were edited by his wife (a slightly better-remembered author) and published not long after his death. Typically, the diaries describe his diplomatic life. One interesting entry focuses on the marriage of Prince William to Princess Amelia - a royal wedding, Prussian style.

Jackson was born in 1785, the youngest son of Dr Thomas Jackson, one of the canons of the Abbey of Westminster at the time, and subsequently canon residentiary of St Paul’s. Although initially destined to follow his father into the church, he went instead, in 1801, to Paris. There he acted as unpaid attache to his much older brother, Francis, who had been appointed minister during negotiations that were to lead to the Treaty of Amiens (and a temporary halt in the ongoing war between France and Britain).

In 1805, during his brother’s temporary absence, George Jackson was presented at the Prussian court as charge d’affaires. The following year, he was sent to north Germany to oversee a renewal in friendly relations with Prussia, and, in 1807-1808, he helped with the negotiations and ratification of a new treaty with the Kingdom of Prussia. He was subsequently appointed as one of the secretaries of legation in the mission to the Spanish Junta.

Later, Jackson was posted to the headquarters of the allied armies in Germany throughout the campaigns of 1813-1814; finally entering Paris with the allies. On the return of the King of Prussia to Berlin, he was charge d’affaires to that court, remaining until 1816, when he was appointed to St Petersburg. Subsequently, he was sent to Madrid, and, from 1823 to 1827, he was posted to Washington, as commissioner, under the first article of the Treaty of Ghent, for the settlement of American claims.

After several years in Sierra Leone, as Commissary Judge, he was appointed, in 1832 (the year he was knighted), Chief Commissioner for the convention on the abolition of the African slave trade. This took him first to Rio Janeiro, until 1841, then to Surinam, and, from 1845, to St Paul de Loanda. He retired in 1859, having married only three years earlier; and he died at Boulogne-sur-Mer on 2 May 1861. There is very little information about Jackson online, not even a Wikipedia article - although there is one about his wife, Catherine, who went on to become author.

After Jackson’s death, Catherine edited her husband’s diaries and letters from when he was still a young man in the early days of his diplomatic career. These were published in 1872 by Richard Bentley in two volumes as The Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson K C H - From the Peace of Amiens to the Battle of Talavara. A year later, two more volumes were published: The Bath Archives - A Further Selection from the Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson K C H from 1809 to 1916.

Lady Jackson says in her introduction to the first volume: ‘The great interest taken by Mr G Jackson in public affairs, from the very outset of his career, and the especial advantage he possessed of a thorough diplomatic training, under his brother - a man of considerable talent, and distinction in his profession - give to the observations and opinions contained in the diaries and letters of this young attache, a certain value, as outlines of the events of the above-named period, which are traced, it is thought, with sufficient firmness to convey a fairly correct notion of the scenes depicted and the characters portrayed.’

Here is one long extract from Jackson’s diary (available at Internet Archive) about a Prince William getting married - though the royal family is Prussian, and the wedding took place in Berlin.

13 January 1804
‘Yesterday, the marriage of Prince William and the Princess Amelia took place at the palace. The royal diadem was placed on the head of the bride by the queen mother, in the presence of the royal family. They then went in procession to the state rooms, fitted up by Frederick I, and where all royal marriages are performed.

The prince, in the uniform of a Prussian general, with the princess, dressed in white satin and silver - four maids of honour bearing her train - walked first; the king, with the queen mother; the queen, with Prince Henry, and eight other royal couples followed. Each was preceded by gentlemen of their respective courts, and followed by their chief officers, with the maids of honour attending the royal ladies.

The procession passed through the old court chapel and the gallery - two hundred feet in length - to the White Hall, in which are the statues, in white marble, of the old electors.

Here the Court chaplain, M Sack, was waiting, under a canopy of red velvet, to perform the marriage ceremony. All the royal family, with the exception of the queen mother - for whom a velvet-covered chair was provided - stood in a half circle round the bride and bridegroom; the rest of the company formed a second half circle outside the royal one.

At the moment when the rings were exchanged, a signal was given, and the twenty-four cannon before the palace were fired in succession three times.

The Court then proceeded to the card-room, where the newly-married couple sat down to whist with the king and the queen mother. The Queen, Prince Henry, the bride’s mother - the Landgravine of Hesse - and the Prince of Orange, formed another table; the rest of the company made up four others. When they had finished their rubber, they adjourned to the state-room, and the royal party took supper; which was served on gold plate, and under a canopy of red velvet. During the repast a band of music was stationed in the silver orchestra. This orchestra is, in fact, only plated; the original one was of solid silver, but at the commencement of the Seven Years’ War, the Great Frederick, finding his coffers rather empty, melted it down for crowns, and supplied its place with the present one.

The meats served to the royal table were cut up by Generals Elsna and Beville - standing - and were afterwards distributed, or handed round, by the marshal, and officers of the Court, les grandes maîtresses, and maids of honour. These menial offices are performed by them only on such exceptional occasions, and their duties end when the royal party have drunk their first glass, which, according to court etiquette, is always immediately after the first course is served. Their distinguished attendants then retire to take supper also, with the rest of the company, at adjoining tables. There were five of those extra tables, each presided over by a person of high rank.

Supper ended, they returned to the White Hall, and the ministers of state, each with a fourfold burning torch of white wax in his hand, assembled near the throne to await the arrival of the Court to commence the Fackel dance, with which the marriage ceremony concludes; a custom observed only at this Court, and supposed to have been originally intended to represent the Court of Hymen conducting the new-married pair to the nuptial chamber.

As soon as the royal party entered, the trumpets and kettle-drums of the king’s Garde du Corps, and the regiment of Gendarmes, struck up a sort of polonaise. The grand marshal, with his long black wand, led off first. The ministers, with their flaming torches, followed. Then came the prince and his wife, and the four maids of honour bearing the train. Slowly marching towards the royalties, ranged in a circle round the throne, the princess left the arm of her husband, and advancing towards the king, curtseyed profoundly, thus inviting him to make the first tour with her. This over, the same ceremony was gone through with all the princes, according to the order observed in the marriage procession. The prince then commenced his tours, first with the queen mother, then the queen, and all the princesses in succession; the ministers, with their hymeneal torches, preceding each couple. To some of the festive torch-bearers these numerous tours seemed to be tours de force they were hardly equal to; and they must surely have succumbed if Providence had not spared them the minuets with which they at first were threatened. But at length the tours were ended; and the royal bride and bridegroom were then escorted to their apartments to undress; the former by the queen mother and the other royal ladies, the latter by the king and princes.

When the princess was supposed to be in bed, the company assembled in the ante-room to receive from her grande maîtresse small pieces of embroidered riband, representing her royal highness’s garter.

Thus ended this royal wedding, which put me in mind of an old drama, got up with new scenery, dresses, processions, banquets, trumpets, kettle- drums, &c, &c.

We take our share of the general fuss, and celebrate the happy event by a ball on the 18th.’

My birthday again

Today, one hundred and ninety years ago, was born Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. A religious man, and, in his day, a well-known philanthropist, he campaigned to improve factory conditions and to restrict the hours children were allowed to work. His diaries were quoted extensively in a three volume biography published the year after his death.

Cooper was born in Richmond, near London, on 28 April 1801, the eldest son of ten children. He was educated at Harrow and Christ College, Oxford, and when only 25, was elected as MP for Woodstock, a Shaftesbury family borough. He married Emily Cowper, whose real father was rumoured to be Lord Palmerston (who did marry Emily’s mother after Lord Cowper’s death). They had ten children some of them beset with health problems.

From the outset in his Parliamentary career, Cooper was interested in social reform. Early on he was a member of a committee looking into the treatment of lunatics, a subject which he followed through for much of his career. In 1832, he became the leader of the factory reform movement in the House of Commons. A year later he proposed a bill to restrict children’s working time to ten hours. It was defeated, but the government nevertheless brought in new restrictions on child labour in the 1933 Factory Act. Some years later, in 1840, Lord Ashley helped set up the Children’s Employment Commission which led to the Coal Mines Act prohibiting women and children from working underground.

In 1851, on the death of his father, Cooper became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. He continued to campaign for more restrictive legislation on child working hours, and his work led to the passing of the so-called Ten Hours Act in 1847. He also campaigned on education and was chairman of the Ragged Schools Union which established many schools for poor families. He died in 1885. For more biographical information see The Victorian Web or Wikipedia. The Diary Junction has information on the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who lived two centuries earlier, and was also a diarist, and was also called Anthony Ashley Cooper.

Here are several extracts from The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury by Edwin Hodder, published in three volumes by Cassell & Company in 1886, all of them written by Cooper on his birthday.

28 April 1826
My birthday, and now I am twenty-five years old - a great age for one who is neither wise, nor good, nor useful, nor endowed with capability of becoming so. People would answer me, ‘Why, you have not lost your time, you have always been engaged;’ quite true, but always upon trifles; indeed, since my quitting Oxford, a space now of three years, I have absolutely done harm to my intellects, by false reasoning which, however rare it may have been, is the only exercise which has disturbed my mental indolence. What might have been performed in three years? but not a study commenced, not an object pursued; not a good deed done, not a good thought generated: for my thoughts are too unsteady for the honour of that title. Visions without end, but, God be praised, all of a noble character. I fancy myself in wealth and power, exerting my influence for the ends that I sought it for, for the increase of religion and true happiness. No man had ever more ambition, and probably my seeming earnestness for great and good purposes was merely a proof of hotter ambition and deeper self- deception than exists in others. That I am not completely in despair must come from God who knows, . . . Latterly I have taken to hard study. It amuses me and prevents mischief. Occasionally the question ‘cui bono’ sours my spirit of application; but generally speaking, I have stilled the passions. An attachment during my residence at Vienna commenced a course of self-knowledge for me. Man never has loved more furiously or more imprudently. The object was, and is, an angel, but she was surrounded by, and would have brought with her, a halo of hell.

28 April 1827.
‘My birthday again; and God be praised that I have arrived at it without any intolerable calamity of mind or body. It has been a year of study and exertion, but I have neither learnt nor done anything. Yet look at the history of all men who have obtained a degree of efficiency. They began much earlier to signalise their merits. Cicero opened his Pleadings at twenty-six, my age, . . ; Scipio was consul at twenty-four ; Pitt prime minister at twenty-three. All the men at the present day started while still of supple years. Peel, Canning, Robinson, were all younger than I am now, who have not done one thing, nor acquired the power of doing one thing, which might be serviceable to my country or an honour to myself. And yet I cannot keep down an aspiring sentiment - a sentiment which, God knows, aims at all virtue, and through that, aiming at all greatness. I cannot understand why my time is less profitably employed than the time of others. I read, think, make every endeavour, but no good result comes of it, and this year has found me as unprepared as the last, and the next year will find me no better than this has done. To be sure my weak stomach has a sad effect upon the head, but this is not all, I must confess painful deficiency, and in humbleness make the best of it.’

28 April 1831
‘Dorchester. Another birthday in the midst of an election and a falling country. Were I not married to a woman whose happiness, even for an hour, I prefer to whole years of my own, I could wish to be away from the scene of destruction and carried to an unearthly place, rather than see my country crumble before my eyes. Whatever be the result of this General Election relative to the Bill, the Ministers have succeeded in rendering some Reform inevitable.’

28 April 1843
‘My birthday. I am this day forty-two years old, more than half my course is run, even supposing that I fulfil the age assigned by the Psalmist to fallen man. ‘A short life, and a merry one,’ says the sensualist’s proverb; a long life and a useful one, would be more noble and more Scriptural; but it is spoken to the praise of Solomon, and by God himself, that he had not asked a long life; neither then will I; but I do ask, for to this we have the warranty of the Holy Word, that the residue of my years be given to the advancement of the Lord’s glory, and to the temporal and eternal welfare of the human race. Surely I may also pray to see, and even to reap, some fruit of my labours, to discern at least some probability of harvest, although to be gathered by other hands!

The Factory Bill drags a long - ten years have witnessed no amelioration - the plan for Education is defeated; the Opium effort is overthrown. On the Colliery Question alone have I had partial success, and that even is menaced by evil and selfish men.’

28 April 1884
‘My birthday, and I have now struck the figure of eighty-three. It is wonderful, it is miraculous, with my infirmities, and even sufferings, of body, with sensible decline of mental application and vigour, I yet retain, by God’s mercy, some power to think and to act. May He grant, for Christ’s sake, that, to my last hour, I may be engaged in His service, and in the full knowledge of all that is around and before me! Cobden used to say of D’Israeli - I have heard him more than once - “What a retrospect that man will have!” Retrospects must be terrible to every one who measures and estimates his hopes by the discharge of his duties here on earth. Unless he be overwhelmed with self-righteousness, he must see that, when weighed in the balance he will be found wanting. But what are the prospects? They may be bright, joyous certain, in the faith and fear of the Lord Jesus.’

Acts of wanton cruelty

William Dyott, a soldier who served all over the world for the British army and faithfully kept a diary, was born exactly a quarter of a millennium ago today. He’s not well remembered - does not even have a Wikipedia entry for the moment! - but the published diary is available online and provides some extraordinary colourful descriptions of his experiences abroad, such as when he was sent to the West Indies to deal with a revolt by slaves.

Dyott was born in Staffordshire on 17 April 1761 into a well-off family, and was schooled privately before attending a military college near London. He joined the army in 1781, and served in Ireland, Nova Scotia (where he became friends with Prince William, later William IV), West Indies (to help quell a negro uprising influenced by French revolutionists) and Egypt. He rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming a lieutenant-colonel in 1795, a major-general in 1808, and a lieutenant-general in 1813, although by then he was no longer on active service. During his service he also travelled to Spain and The Netherlands, where he took part in the disastrous Walcheren Expedition.

For a short while, in 1804, Dyott took up duties as an aide-de-campe to George III, accompanying members of the royal family to the theatre, and playing cards with the queen and her daughters. He married Eleanor Thompson in 1806, and they had two sons and a daughter. However, she eloped with another man in 1814. A year earlier, he had inherited the family estates near Lichfield, and thenceforward became much concerned with agricultural policies. He was a local Justice of the Peace, and a neighbour/friend of Robert Peel. He died in 1847. There is a short biography of Dyott at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which requires a log in). Otherwise, though, more details are available online in the introduction to his diary.

From the age of 20 until the year before he died, Dyott kept a diary filling 16 volumes. This was edited by Reginald W Jeffery and published in two volumes by Archibald Constable in 1907 as Dyott’s Diary, 1781-1845: a selection from the journal of William Dyott, sometime general in the British army and aide-de-camp to His Majesty King George III. The full texts are available at Internet Archive.

Here are two extracts from Dyott’s time in the West Indies.

16 March 1796
‘Employed in burying the dead, and sending away the wounded by sea to St George’s. I never beheld such a sight as Post Royal Hill, etc. The number of dead bodies and the smell was dreadful. The side of the hill on which the enemy endeavoured to make their retreat was extremely steep and thickly covered with wood, and the only method of discovering the killed was from the smell. It was near a fortnight after the action that many bodies were found. Nine days after the post was taken a mulatto man was discovered in the woods that had been wounded in three places two shots through his thigh. The only thing he had tasted was water, but to the astonishment of everybody he recovered.

The negroes and people of colour can certainly suffer and endure far greater torture than white people. I have seen two or three instances of this kind that astonished me. One in particular at Hooks Bay. Two negroes were taken prisoners the day we got possession of the post, and in order to secure them they were forced into a sort of arched place something like what I have seen under steps made use of to tie up a dog. There was just room for the poor devils to creep in on their hands and knees and to lie down. After they had got in, two soldiers of the 29th regiment put the muzzles of their firelocks to the doorplace and fired at them. I ran to see what the firing was, but before I got to the place they had fired a second round. On reaching the spot I made a negro draw out these miserable victims of enraged brutality. One of them was mangled in a horrid manner. The other was shot through the hip, the body, and one thigh, and notwithstanding all, he was able to sit up and to answer a number of questions that were asked him respecting the enemy. The poor wretch held his hand on the wound in his thigh, as if that only was the place he suffered from. The thigh bone must have been shattered to pieces, as his leg and foot were turned under him. The miserable being was not suffered to continue long in his wretchedness, as one of his own colour came up and blew his brains out sans ceremonie. This account does no credit to the discipline of the army. I own I was most completely ashamed of the whole proceeding, and said all I could to the General of the necessity of making an example to put a stop to these acts of wanton cruelty, being certain that nothing leads to anarchy and confusion in an army so soon as suffering a soldier in any instance to trespass the bounds of strict regularity, or to permit him to be guilty of an act of cruelty or injustice.

During the night of the 26th the enemy set fire to their works on Pilot Hill and evacuated the post. This post was situated about two miles from Post Royal on the coast. There was a most unfortunate accident happened in Hooks Bay on the 26th. The Ponsburne East Indiaman, that had brought part of the reinforcement from Barbadoes, drove from her anchors and went to pieces in a very short time. All the hands were saved, but every article of stores, ammunition, etc., was lost. It was an awful sight seeing the power of the element dashing to atoms in the space of two hours so stately a production of man’s art. This with the loss of a schooner drove on shore made it necessary to retain the post at Madam Hooks longer than was intended to my very great annoy, as a great quantity of provisions, etc. etc., were drifted on shore, which it was thought proper to destroy to prevent it falling into the enemy’s hands.’

14 May 1796
‘A vessel with Spanish colours came close in with the land, as if she intended going into Hooks Bay. On the supposition of her having a reinforcement for the brigands on board from the island of Trinidad, a party was sent to oppose their landing, but the vessel did not run into the bay. My tent was, I believe, infested with every species of reptile the island produces: a scorpion, lizard, tarantula, land-crab, and centipede had been caught by my black boy, and the mice were innumerable. I was prevented bathing in consequence of what is called in the West Indies the prickly heat. It is an eruption that breaks out all over the body, and from the violent itching and prickly sensation it has got the above appellation. All new-comers to the West Indies are subject to it, and when it is out it is considered as a sign of health. Bathing, I was told, was liable to drive it in. Nothing can equal the extreme unpleasant sensation, and people sometimes scratch themselves to that degree as to occasion sores. About this time our part of the army was suffering in a most shameful manner for the want of numerable articles in which it stood much in need. Neither wine or medicine for the sick, and not a comfort of any one kind for the good duty soldier; salt pork, without either peas or rice, for a considerable time, and for three days nothing but hard, dry, bad biscuit for the whole army, officers and men. Two days without (the soldiers’ grand comfort) grog.’

The Last of England

‘Rain; so had out the picture of ‘Last of England’ & scraped at the head of the female, afterwards worked at it 2 hours without model & four hours with - using zinc white.’ This is Ford Madox Brown, a major British 19th century painter, associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, who was born 190 years ago today. Intermittently, he kept diary notes about his painting habits, though full of mundane details, they do give a vivid sense of his daily life.

Brown was born on 16 April 1821 to English parents in France, but then brought up and educated in Belgium. In the mid-1840s, he settled in London and began to associate with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was his student for a while. Brown’s first wife, Elizabeth Bromley, died in 1846 aged 27, after giving birth to a daughter Lucy. He later married his model, Emma Hill, and they had one son, Oliver, who died as a young man, and one daughter, Catherine, who was the mother of Ford Madox Ford.

Brown’s two greatest paintings Work and The Last of England [as in illustration above] were both begun in 1852. During the 1860s, he was closely associated with William Morris’s developing business and worked as an illustrator and as a designer of furniture and stained glass. He is best known, though, for his historical and biblical paintings and frescoes. In 1878, Brown was commissioned to paint a series of 12 murals for Manchester Town Hall. They took up much of the last years of his life. He is credited with helping to found the Hogarth Club and the Working Men’s College. For further biographical information see the websites of Manchester Art Gallery or Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, or Wikipedia.

Intermittently, through his life, Brown kept brief diary notes, mostly about his painting life. There are six extant exercise books, five covering the period from 1847 to 1855 (held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), and one covering more then ten years from 1856 to 1865 (held by Pierpont Morgan Library in New York). The five earlier diary books were first edited by W M Rossetti (Dante’s br0ther) for his Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters, published by Hurst and Blackett in 1900. This is freely available online at Internet Archive. In 1981, Yale University Press published The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, edited by Virginia Surtees. In this version, Brown’s diaries are reproduced more faithfully (i.e including Brown’s ‘distinctive’ spelling and punctuation) than they are in Rossetti’s grammatically-sanitised version.

Here are several extracts of Brown’s diary (taken from The Diary of Ford Madox Brown). See also The Diary Review article on William Holman Hunt - The might of genius

17 August 1854
‘Rose at 1/4 before nine - garden after breakfast. Shower Bath before work. To work by 11 till one at the view of Windermere. Dined, to work again by 2 till near six worked at sky & all over. Tea & then for a walk with Emma. An umbrella each for a threatening storm which caught us sure as we returned. This even I intended drawing but instead reflected on alterations made in the picture of Christ & Peter which I think of sending to Paris with the Chaucer, if the English Committee [of the Universal Exhibition, Paris, 1855] accept it (6 hours). The Christ in its present state I consider to be failure - too much melo-dramatic sentiment not sufficient dignity and simplicity of pose. What to do with it however I scarce know. To suite the public taste however it should be clothed! to suit my own, not - but then the action suits me not to alter which would be more trouble than to cloath the figure. Auriole they must all have. The St John is all right. The Peter would be perfect if the carnation were redder & deeper in tint & the cloak a better green, also a bit of the right arm should be shown; but how? Judas requires a fresh head of hair - his present one having been dabbed in from feeling in the last hurry of sending in. Memo, his garment to be a paler yellow. Four of the other apostles require more religious feeling which must be done. William & Gabriel Rossetti in particular require veneration to be added to them. The table cloath will require alteration & the tiles of the floor. Health & spirits tolerable to day, nerves quiet.’

19 September 1854
‘Rain; so had out the picture of ‘Last of England’ & scraped at the head of the female, afterwards worked at it 2 hours without model & four hours with - using zinc white. Afterwards retouched ‘Beauty’ which with constant wetting was much blurred - in the eveng fixed it in frame, lettered it, & pasted loosse drawing up in my big book (7 1/2 hours).’

20 September 1854
‘. . . After dinner, worked at drawing in the outline of the male head in ‘the Last of England’ - then reflected on it till near five, settled that I would paint the woman in Emma’s shepherd plaid shawl, in stead of the large blue & green plaid as in the sketch. This is a serious affair settled which has caused me much perplexity. After this I worked till tea-time at scraping away the ground of Zink white which I had laid myself for the picture at Hampstead. I found that the head of the man had cracked all over since I painted it, so had to scrape it out - his coat also has crack in it, a bad thing in a coat in particular, so I will have no more of this zink, confound it. There is nothing like tin for a foundation to go upon, in this system will I work henceforth. After tea I worked at altering the little laydy reading a letter in the ‘Brent’ which had rubbed in from Emma the other day, I have made it more sentimental. After this I cleaned my pallet & brushes & am now writing this. I must leave off to begin the lettering of the ‘Cartoon’ & painted scetch of ‘the Last of England’ - only did the scetch 11 pm (6 1/2 hours).’

Drawing up the sluices

Soldier, politician and spymaster, Sir William Brereton - perhaps best remembered for besieging Chester during the Civil War - died 350 years ago today. As a youngish man, he travelled abroad, and kept detailed and interesting notes of his journeys, sometimes of local military tactics.

Brereton was born at Handforth, Cheshire, but lost his father when only six. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and then, when 23, was created a baron by Charles I. A year later he was elected MP for Cheshire but relinquished his seat so as to travel - to Holland, Scotland and Ireland. He married twice, once to Susannah who died in 1637, leaving two sons and two daughters, and once to Cicely, who also bore him two daughters (according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). A staunch Puritan he advocated major reform of the Anglican church.

Brereton was re-elected to Parliament in 1640, and opposed the King on policies in many areas. After the outbreak of civil war in 1642, he was appointed a major-general of Parliament’s forces. He is recorded to have had particular skills in the areas of espionage and siege warfare. His greatest triumph is said to be the siege and capture of Chester, which took over one year to complete.

Brereton was one of very few leaders allowed to retain his military command and his seat in Parliament after the Self-Denying Ordinance. With the war over, Brereton was rewarded with Eccleshall Castle and the tenancy of Croydon Palace, the former home of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1652. He died on 7 April 1661, according to Wikipedia, and further biographical information is also available from the Spartacus Educational.

During his travels, Brereton kept journals, and these were edited by Edward Hawkins and published by the Chetham Society in 1844 under the title, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland, 1634–1635. Parts of the diary were republished in North Country Diaries by the Surtees Society in 1915. Both volumes are freely available at Internet Archive.

It is said that Brereton learned warfaring tactics abroad, in Holland, and there is some evidence of this in his diary, such as when he notes: ‘Mr Goodier told me of a strange deliverance of this town besieged, wherein the famine and pestilence raging, the town not being able to hold out any longer, the country was drowned by drawing up their sluices and cutting the banks, and the night following the wall in one place, convenient for the enemies to enter, fell down and broke down (a great breach); the noise whereof and the sudden eruption of the water took such impression of fear, and occasioned the apprehension of some further danger by some further design; whereupon they broke up their siege, and left the town. For this strange preservation a solemn day of thanksgiving kept yearly in this city.’

Here is Brereton’s first diary entry in 1634 (taken from the 1844 volume), and this is followed by a long entry in 1635 (taken directly from University College Cork website which has the Irish parts of the journal online).

17 May 1634.
‘We departed from London by water; we came to Gravesend about eight of the clock In the evening; we came in a light-horseman [small boat]; took water about three clock in afternoon. A dainty cherry orchard of Captain Lord’s, planted three years ago, near unto Thames, not forty roods distant. The stocks one yard and a half high; prosper well; but I conceive the top will in a short time be disproportionable to the stock. Very many of the trees bear. It is three acres of ground; planted four hundred and forty-odd trees. An old cherry orchard near adjoining nothing well set: this year the cherries sold for £20: it is but an acre of ground: the grass reserved and excepted. A proper ship came from Middleborough on Saturday at noon, 17 May.

Stiff N.W. wind all Sunday; turned E. on 19 Monday morn. Passed by Gravesend on Monday about four. Captain Boare went from Gravesend on 15 May; went to Rotterdam; returned thither 20. Another ship came in twenty-four hours from Brill to Gravesend.

A delicate kiln to burn chalk lime; it is the Duke of Lenox, near Gravesend, upon the river side; it is made of brick, narrow at bottom, round, and wider at top; it is emptied always at the bottom; they hook out so much as is cold, until they pull out fire, and then cease. It is supplied with fire and chalk at top; one basket of sea-coals proportioned to eight of chalk; the fire extinguisheth not from one end of the year to the other. When it is kindled, fire is put to the bottom: it is sold for a groat, one hoop burnt. The pit is in the side of an hill, which is thirty yards high; one of the workmen fell (with whom I conferred) from top to bottom, not slain, but bruised and still sore. An horse stuck by the fore-legs, and held and cried out like a child, and stuck until he was helped up by men.’

21 July 1635
‘We went home about eight hour, and came to Ballihack, a poor little village on this side the passage over the river of Waterford, which here is the broadest passage said to be in Ireland, and a most rough, troubled passage when the wind is anything high. Here last day the boat, wherein my Lord of Kildare came over, was in danger to be run under water by carrying too much sail, and running foul upon the passage boat. Down this river come all the shipping for Waterford. Here we saw the Ninth Whelp lying at anchor, to guard the fleet which now is ready to go hence to Bristoll fair. Sir Beverley Newcombe is captain of her, and is now at Waterford. They say there are about fifty sail to go to St. James fair at Bristoll. The Irish here use a very presumptuous proverb and speech touching this passage. They always say they must be at Bristoll fair, they must have a wind to Bristoll fair, and indeed it is observed they never fail of a wind to Bristoll fair; yea, though the fair be begun, and the wind still averse, yet still do they retain their confident presumption of a wind. It is most safe here to hire a boat to pass over in, not with horses, which is rowed over with four oars. I paid for the hire of it 2s. This is a full mile over. The passage boat which carries your horses will not carry at one time more than two or three horses. Here is far better coming into the boat and landing than at Port Patricke, but less and worse boats. On Munster side is good lodging and accommodation.

This day we passed over the land of a gentleman whose name is [. . .]. He died about seven days ago of a gangrene; his fingers and hands, toes and feet, rotted off, joint by joint. He was but a young man, of above 1,000£ per annum, and married an old woman, a crabbed piece of flesh, who cheated him with a 1,000£ she brought him, for which he was arrested within three days after his marriage.

We came to Waterford about three hour, and baited at the King’s Head, at Mr Wardes, a good house, and a very complete gentleman-like host. This town is reputed one of the richest towns in Ireland. It stands upon a river (called Watterford River), which maintaineth a sufficiently deep and safe channel even to the very quay, which, indeed, is not only the best and most convenient quay which I found in Ireland, but it is as good a quay as I have known either in England or observed in all my travels. A ship of three hundred may come close to these quays. This quay is made all along the river side without the walls, and divers fair and convenient buttresses made about twenty yards long, which go towards the channel. I saw the river at a spring tide flow even with the top of this quay, and yet near the quay a ship of three hundred ton full loaden may float at a low water. Upon this river stand divers forts and castles which command it. At the mouth of the river is there a fort called Duncannon, wherein lieth my Lord Esmond’s company, consisting of fifty good, expert soldiers. Here is also a company of fifty soldiers, which are under the command of Sir George Flowre, an ancient knight. These are disposed of in the fort, which is placed without the gate towards Caricke, a pretty little hold, which stands on high and commands the town. There stands upon this river the Carick twelve mile, hence, and Clonmell about eight mile thence; hither (as I have heard) the river flows. There is, seated upon this river also Golden Bridge, and there is a passage by water from Cullen [?] and Limbrecke. This is no barred, but a most bold haven, in the mouth whereof is placed an eminent tower, a sea mark, to be discerned at a great distance; yet this river runs so crooked as without a W. or N.W. Hence went a great fleet to Bristoll fair, who stayed long here waiting for a wind.

This city is governed by a mayor, bailiffs, and twelve aldermen. Herein are seven churches; there have been many more. One of these, Christ Church, a cathedral; St. Patrick’s, Holy Ghost, St. Stephen’s, St. John - but none of these are in good repair, not the cathedral, nor indeed are there any churches almost to be found in good repair. Most of the inhabitants Irish, not above forty English, and not one of these Irish goes to church. This town trades much with England, France, and Spain, and that which gives much encouragement hereunto is the goodness of the haven.

This town double-walled, and the walls maintained in good repair. Here we saw women in a most impudent manner treading clothes with their feet; these were naked to the middle almost, for so high were their clothes tucked up about them. Here the women of better rank and quality wear long, high laced caps, turned up round about; these are mighty high; of this sort I gave William Dale money to buy me one. Here is a good, handsome market-place, and a most convenient prison that I ever saw for the women apart, and this is a great distance from the men’s prison. Herein dwells a judicious apothecary, who hath been bred at Antwerpe, and is a traveller; his name is (as I take it) Mr Jarvis Billiard, by whose directions and good advice I found much good, and through God’s mercy recovered from my sickness. After I had dined here, I went about four or five hour towards Caricke, where I stayed at a ferry about a mile from Waterford a whole hour for the boat, wherein we and our six horses were carried over together.

Hence to Caricke is accounted nine miles, good large ones, but very fair way, and very ready to find. We came to Caricke about nine hour. We lodged at the sign of the Three Cuts at Mr Croummer’s, where is a good neat woman. Here my disease increasing, I wanted good accommodation.

Here is my Lord of Ormond’s house, daintily seated on the river bank, which flows even to the walls of his house, which I went to see, and found in the outer court three or four hay-stacks, not far from the stable-door; this court is paved. There are also two other courts; the one a quadrangle. The house was built at twice. If his land were improved and well planted, it would yield him great revenue; for it is said he hath thirty-two manors and manor-houses, and eighteen abbeys. This town of Carick is seated upon the bank of a fine, pleasant, navigable river, but it is a most poor place, and the houses many quite ruinated, others much decayed; here is no trade at all. This hath been a town of strength and defence; it is walled about, and with as strong a wall, and that to walk upon, as is West Chester; the church in no good repair; nor any of the churches in this country, which argues their general disaffection unto religion. Here in this town is the poorest tavern I ever saw - a little low, thatched Irish house, not to be compared unto Jane Kelsall’s of the Green at Handforth. ‘Twixt Waterford and this town are many spacious sheep-pastures, and very fair large sheep as most in England; the greatest part of the land hereabouts is converted unto this use.’

Wicked worldly thoughts

‘This morne my wife began, after her old manner, to braule and revile mee for wishing her only to wear such apparrell as was decent and comly, and accused mee for treading on her sore foote, with curses and othes; which to my knowledge I touched not.’ This is Adam Eyre - whose funeral took place 350 years ago today - a Yorkshire yeoman who is remembered chiefly for his diary and its vivid domestic details.

Born in 1614 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Eyre married Susannah Mathewman in 1640. During the Civil War, he was a commissioned captain in the Parliament’s army, under Fernando, Lord Fairfax. In 1651, he styled himself a gentleman, and purchased crown lands at Blandesby Park, in Pickering, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, though he went into debt to do so. Although the date of his death is not recorded, it is known that he was buried on 6 April 1661, probably at Penistone in Yorkshire.

A short biography for Eyre can be found at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (although log in is required); and English folk: A Book of Characters, by Wallace Notestein, available at Googlebooks, has a chapter on Eyre. Also there’s an article about him in the spring 1994 edition of Journal of Social History, available at JSTOR. However, almost all the information about Eyre is sourced from his ‘dyurnall’, a diary, covering a period between 1647 and 1649. Apart from recording his mediation in local quarrels, it provides vivid descriptions of domestic disharmony.

Jeremy Boulton’s home page at the University of Newcastle website has a few select entries from Eyre’s diary. The full text, however, was included in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries published by the Surtees Society in 1877, and this is available online at Internet Archive. Here are a couple of extracts.

8 June 1647
‘This morne my wife began, after her old manner, to braule and revile mee for wishing her only to wear such apparrell as was decent and comly, and accused mee for treading on her sore foote, with curses and othes; which to my knowledge I touched not; nevertheless she continued in that extacy til noone; and at diner I told her I purposed never to com in bed with her til shee tooke more notice of what I formerly had sayd to her, which I pray God give mee grace to observe; that the folly of myne owne corrupt nature deceive mee not to myne own damnacion. After diner I went to Bulhouse where I had bidden an Ale for Antho. Crosland, and got him 29s. 6d. I spent myselfe 1s. 5d., and lent Raph Wordsworth of Waterhall Dalton’s ‘Justice of Peace’ [a law book]. I received a note from Jos. Eyre to be at Castleton on Thursday next at the cort. I signed a note for payment for 2 waynes by the towne.’

6 August 1647
‘This morning wee went to the wayre in the Wayre field, and Christofer Marsden came, and would have made a rescusse for working in our owne ground; and sayd ye stream was the king’s, and hee had as much right in it as I; and gave mee other ill language; wherupon, as soone as hee was gone, I went and cutt the boughes which grew on this syde his fence. Then came his wife and gave somewhat better words, yett tarte enough. Then at noone I went home, and received for 2 loads of meal out of the new arke 1l. 18s. 10d.; and Thomas Marsden having pinned a peice of wood in the wayre, came and made mee standing for my meare in the old stable. Then I went up to them again, and sent 1s worth of ale; and at night payd to Jo. Goddard for this week’s work 5s; his sonne 3s; and Tho. Marsden 6d.

This night my wife had a painful night of her foote, which troubled mee so that sleepe went from mee. Wherupon sundry wicked worldly thoughts came in my head, and, namely, a question whether I should live with my wife or noe, if shee continued so wicked as shee is; wherupon I ris and prayd to God to direct mee a right. And, after I read good counsell of Lawrence concerning the assistance of Angells, and the Devil, and our owne wills provoking to him. I prayed God again to direct mee, and so slept til morne quietly, praysed by God.’

Herbert goes to war

Albania’s Greatest Friend: Aubrey Herbert and the Making of Modern Albania is being published today (at least according to Amazon’s website) by I B Tauris, a leading publisher of non-fiction books on history, politics and international relations. The book is based on the diaries and papers of Aubrey Herbert, a young aristocrat - said to be the inspiration for Sandy Arbuthnut, the fictional hero created by John Buchan - who travelled extensively to Albania before the First World War, and did much to help it become an independent nation. Some of Herbert’s First World War diaries are freely available online.

Herbert was born at Highclere, near Newbury, Berkshire, in 1880. He was the second son of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, a landowner, British cabinet minister and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. After being schooled at Eton and studying history at Balliol College, Oxford, he became an (unpaid) honorary attaché in the diplomatic service, firstly in Tokyo and then in Constantinople. Subsequently, he travelled extensively, mostly in the Turkish provinces, learning to speak half a dozen languages. In particular he became a passionate advocate of Albanian independence, visiting the country many times.

In 1910, Herbert married Mary Vesey, daughter of Viscount de Vesci, and they would have four children, the youngest of whom married Eveyln Waugh. In 1911, Herbert became a Conservative Member of Parliament for the Yeovil Division of Somerset, a constituency which he held till his death. With the outbreak of the First World War, Herbert, despite poor eyesight, obtained a commission in the Irish Guards. He was wounded and taken prisoner in France, but escaped. Subsequently, he worked for military intelligence, involved in the Gallipoli Campaign, among others, and in negotiations with the Turks. In the last months of the war he was head of the English Mission attached to the Italian Army in Albania, and held the temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Herbert was twice offered, unofficially, the throne of Albania, once before the war when he declined, and once after, when circumstances conspired against him. However, his efforts are considered to have helped Albania become an independent nation in 1913, and to its becoming a member of the League of Nations in 1920. He died young, from blood poisoning after a dental operation in 1923. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and a website about Exmoor National Park. It is widely assumed, says Wikipedia, that Herbert was the inspiration for the character Sandy Arbuthnot, a hero in several John Buchan novels.

While abroad, Herbert was an inveterate diary keeper, and some of his diary material has recently been collated and edited by Bejtullah Destani and Jason Tomes for Albania’s Greatest Friend: Aubrey Herbert and the Making of Modern Albania: Diaries and Papers 1904-1923. The book - which according to Amazon is due out today - is being published by I B Tauris.

Here is Tauris’s publicity for the book: ‘Impeccably aristocratic and eccentric in a uniquely English tradition, Aubrey Herbert was at first sight an incongruous champion of Albanian nationalism, to say the least. Tall, slender and slightly stooped, with a moustache and heavily lidded eyes, Herbert wore a monocle and had white patches in his hair caused by an attack of alopoecia in 1911. Within England - let alone abroad - he cut a colourful figure.

But Herbert was also an acclaimed linguist, intrepid traveller and an outspoken and independent thinker, who became enthralled by the Balkans on his first visit to the region in 1904 as honorary attache at the British Embassy in Constantinople. From that time until his death in 1923, he was indefatigable in campaigning for the Albanian cause. He returned frequently to the country and gained respect as an expert on the region, even being honoured with repeated requests that he assume the Albanian throne. Albania’s Greatest Friend charts Herbert’s involvement with Albania over the course of his life, in his own words, through his own extensive diaries and letters.

It paints an authoritative portrait not just of a remarkable Englishman but also sheds fresh light on the wider Albanian national movement and a fascinating period in European history.’

As early as 1919, though, Herbert had published Mons, Anzac & Kut (Hutchinson & Co) based on, and quoting from, his diaries, with an introduction by Desmond MacCarthy, a literary critic working for the New Statesman. The full text of this book is available online at the Great War Primary Documents Archive.

Here is Herbert’s own preface:

‘Journals, in the eyes of their author, usually require an introduction of some kind, which, often, may be conveniently forgotten. The reader is invited to turn to this one if, after persevering through the pages of the diary, he wishes to learn the reason of the abrupt changes and chances of war that befell the writer. They are explained by the fact that his eyesight did not allow him to pass the necessary medical tests. He was able, through some slight skill, to evade these obstacles in the first stage of the war; later, when England had settled down to routine, they defeated him, as far as the Western Front was concerned. He was fortunately compensated for this disadvantage by a certain knowledge of the East, that sent him in various capacities to different fronts, often at critical times. It was as an Interpreter that the writer went to France. After a brief imprisonment, it was as an Intelligence Officer that he went to Egypt, the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia.

The first diary was dictated in hospital from memory and rough notes made on the Retreat from Mons. For the writing of the second diary, idle hours were provided in the Dardanelles between times of furious action. The third diary, which deals with the fall of Kut, was written on the Fly boats of the River Tigris. [. . .]

This diary claims to be no more than a record of great and small events, a chronicle of events within certain limited horizons - a retreat, a siege and an attack. Writing was often hurried and difficult, and the diary was sometimes neglected for a period. If inaccuracies occur, the writer offers sincere apologies.’

And here are a few diary extracts, culled from the text in Mons, Anzac & Kut.

23 April 1915
‘I have just seen the most wonderful procession of ships I shall ever see. In the afternoon we left for the outer harbour. The wind was blowing; there was foam upon the sea and the air of the island was sparkling. With the band playing and flags flying, we steamed past the rest of the fleet. Cheers went from one end of the harbour to the other. Spring and summer met. Everybody felt it more than anything that had gone before.

After we had passed the fleet, the pageant of the fleet passed us. First the Queen Elizabeth, immense, beautiful lines, long, like a snake, straight as an arrow. This time there was silence. It was grim and very beautiful. We would rather have had the music and the cheers . . . This morning instructions were given to the officers and landing arrangements made. We leave at 1.30 to-night. The Australians are to land first. This they should do to-night. Then we land. . . Naval guns will have to cover our advance, and the men are to warned that the naval fire is very accurate. They will need some reassuring if the fire is just over their heads. The 29th land at Helles, the French in Asia near Troy. This is curious, as they can't support us or we them. the Naval Division goes north and makes a demonstration . . . The general opinion is that very many boats must be sunk from the shore. Having got ashore, we go on to a rendezvous. We have no native guides. . . The politicians are very unpopular.’

25 April 1915
‘I got up at 6.30. Thoms, who shared my cabin, had been up earlier. There was a continuous roll of thunder from the south. Opposite to us the land rose steeply in cliffs and hills covered with the usual Mediterranean vegetation. The crackle of rifles sounded and ceased in turns. . . Orders were given to us to start at 8.30 a.m. . . The tows were punctual. . . We were ordered to take practically nothing but rations. I gave my sleeping-bag to Kyriakidis, the old Greek interpreter whom I had snatched from the Arcadia, and took my British warm and my Burberry. . . The tow was unpleasantly open to look at; there was naturally no shelter of any kind. We all packed in, and were towed across the shining sea towards the land fight. . . We could see some still figures lying on the beach to our left, one or two in front. Some bullets splashed round.

As we were all jumping into the sea to flounder ashore, I heard cries from the sergeant at the back of the tow. He said to me: “These two men refuse to go ashore.” I turned and saw Kristo Keresteji and Yanni of Ayo Strati with mesmerized eyes looking at plops tha the bullets made in the water, and with their minds evidently fixed on the Greek equivalent of “Home, Sweet Home.” They were, however, pushed in, and we all scrambled on to that unholy land. The word was then, I thought rather unnecessarily, passed that we were under fire.’

26 April 1915
‘At 5 o’clock yesterday our artillery began to land. It’s a very rough country; the Mediterranean macchia everywhere, and steep, winding valleys. We slept on a ledge a few feet above the beech . . . Firing went on all night. In the morning it was very cold, and we were all soaked. The Navy, it appeared, had landed us in the wrong place. This made the Army extremely angry, though as things turned out it was the one bright spot. Had we landed anywhere else, we should have been wiped out.’

28 April 1915
‘I got up at 4 a.m. this morning, after a fine, quiet night, and examined a Greek deserter from the Turkish Army. He said many would desert if they did not fear for their lives. The New Zealanders spare their prisoners.

Last night, while he was talking to me, Colonel C. was hit by a bit of shell on his hat. He stood quite still while a man might count three, wondering if he was hurt. He then stooped down and picked it up. At 8 p.m. last night there was furious shelling in the gully. Many men and mules hit. General Godley was in the Signalling Office, on the telephone, fairly under cover. I was outside with Pinwell, and got grazed, just avoiding the last burst. Their range is better. Before this they have been bursting the shrapnel too high. It was after 4 p.m. Their range improved so much. My dugout was shot through five minutes before I went there. So was Shaw’s . . .’

11 a.m. All firing except from Helles has ceased. Things look better. The most the men can do is to hang on. General Godley has been very fine. The men know it.

4.30 p.m. Turks suddenly reported to have mounted huge howitzer on our left flank, two or three miles away. We rushed all the ammunition off the beach, men working like ants, complete silence and furious work. We were absolutely enfiladed, and they could have pounded us, mules and machinery, to pulp, or driven us into the gully and up the hill, cutting us off from our water and at the same time attacking us with shrapnel. The ships came up and fired on the new gun, and proved either that it was a dummy or had moved, or had been knocked out. It was a cold, wet night.’

Anne Chalmers in London

‘I have reached a most venerable antiquity,’ wrote Anne Chalmers in her diary on turning 17. She was in London with her famous father, Dr Thomas Chalmers, being a tourist and enjoying the waxworks in Westminster Abbey and the sounds of street sellers. She died 120 years ago today.

Anne Chalmers was born in 1813, to Thomas Chalmers and Grace Pratt who had married the year before. They moved to Glasgow in 1815, and had five more daughters, and to Edinburgh in the 1820s when Chalmers was appointed to the chair of theology at Edinburgh University.

Anne married Dr William Hanna who later wrote a biography of her father - Memoirs of Dr Chalmers - in four volumes. Anne died on 27 March 1891. There is very little information about her online (the photo is taken from National Galleries of Scotland Commons), although there is plenty about her father - at Wikipedia for example - who was famous in his day as a social reformer and the first moderator of the Free Church of Scotland.

Stewart J Brown’s biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required) concludes as follows: Chalmers has remained a controversial figure since his death. For some biographers, including his son-in-law, William Hanna, Chalmers was a saintly figure, a man of deep piety and evangelical conviction, whose main concern was the salvation of souls and who chose to lead a pure remnant out of a corrupt establishment in 1843. For others, such as the mid-twentieth-century historians Andrew Drummond and James Bulloch, he was the ‘evil genius’ of the nineteenth-century church, a middle-class ecclesiastical politician whose poor-relief programmes brought hardship to the labouring orders and whose ambition for power and unwillingness to compromise led to the unnecessary break-up of the national church.’

For a few months in 1830, Anne and her mother accompanied Chalmers to London where he was to give evidence before the Commission on Pauperism. Anne kept a diary of the trip. This was edited by her daughter and published in 1922 ‘for private circulation only’ by The Chelsea Publishing Co. as Letters & Journal - Anne Chalmers. The full text is available at Internet Archive.

Here are a few paragraphs from Norman Maclean’s foreword to the book (also published separately in The Scotsman): ‘It was fortunate that the letters written by Anne Chalmers to her life-long friend Anne Parker (afterwards Lady Cardwell) were preserved, and also her journal of the year 1830, for they gave intimate and vivid glimpses of one of the greatest of Scotsmen Dr. Chalmers. . . She lived all her life among the men who create opinion and mould events. . . The diary . . . gives glimpes of a vanished life. It is not often that a young lady describes the effect of mixing her drinks.

This is Anne’s description of the fatal course: “During dinner I experienced a sensation I never had before. I had only drank a little wine and a very little champagne, and taken a draught of beer, as I thought, but I am sure now it was strong ale. I felt as if my head was chaos, and something appeared to be rushing with immense force and rapidity through it ; but still I continued mechanically, though a sense of shame and horror overpowered me. My advice to every Scotsman is to beware of asking beer in London, for they invariably get either ale or porter!” . . .

The visit that most impressed her was one to Coleridge. The poet talked for half-an-hour on Irving and the Book of Revelation. “The effect of his monologue was on me like that of listening to entrancing music. I burst into tears when it stopped, and we found ourselves suddenly in the open air.” ’

And here are two entries from early on in the diary itself, the day of her birthday and the subsequent day.

5 May 1830
‘Wednesday, the 5th of May, is my birthday. I have reached a most venerable antiquity. Papa, Mamma, and I walked to Westminster Abbey and were conducted over it by the guide. We saw the tombs of many of the kings, nobles, and poets of former days, and wax figures of Charles II, a Duke of Buckingham, Queen Elizabeth, William and Mary, Ann and Nelson (who is like life). Elizabeth has a most disagreeable expression of countenance. Mary and Ann are good-looking. Among other tombs we saw that of Mary Queen of Scots. Her figure is represented in a recumbent posture on it. We also saw the monuments of Edward I, Henry III, Richard II and his queen, the two princes who were murdered in the Tower, Milton, Dryden, Chaucer, Watts, Horner, etc. In one of the apartments stand the chairs on which the King and Queen sit when they are crowned. To that of the King is fixed the Scotch stone on which the Kings of Scotland were once crowned before it was taken from Scone by Edward I. The architecture of this Abbey is splendid. We were in the chapel in which Divine service is performed twice every day. A genuine Scotchman who had been making the round of the Abbey and making remarks with great simplicity on what he saw, here inquired earnestly, ‘But whaur’s the pulpit; whaur does the minister and the precentor sit?’ After looking round the room he was satisfied as to the position of the pulpit. After leaving Westminster we walked through St James’s Park and sat down by the pond in the centre of it, paying a penny each for the refreshment of chairs. The road between St James’s Park and the Green Park resembles the Meadows very much. We were a little fatigued by our excursion, and sat quietly for the rest of the day in our lodgings, to which we began to get somewhat reconciled and accustomed.

In the evening Mr Irving and Mr Nisbet called. When Mr I. was told it was my birthday, he said, ‘Dear child, may it come often.’ He is grieved about the illness of his little dear child! ‘There was nothing extravagant about his appearance. He seems to believe in Mary Campbell’s [a speaker of tongues] miraculous gifts.’

6 May 1830
‘Heard as usual in the morning the varied intonations of the London cries, from the staccato of the old clothes man to the long of the men selling boxes. To-day for the first time I saw a Bishop in his lawn apron. He was a fine-looking man, upon whose countenance a pleasing smile was lighted up as he crossed the street to speak to a gentleman. This last turned out to be MrLockier, who called on us and told us it was the Bishop of London we had seen, a very talented man. Walked through the Horse Guard House and by the side of St James’s Park and through the court of St James’s Palace, where Papa showed us the identical spot at which he had received a curtsey to himself alone from Queen Charlotte many years ago.

We dined with Lord Barham. I was particularly interested by a Mrs O’Brien, who seems a compound of talent, naivete, and gaiety. She is the most lovable person I ever saw. I like Lord Barham. He looks melancholy, and though he is not old, he has laid three wives in the grave. His last wife died about six months ago. It is customary here to hang the escutcheon of the family painted on a black ground on the walls of the house when the head of the family dies.’

Trowps deuouring my hay

One of Britain’s early diarists, Walter Powell, was born 430 years ago this day. He appears to have been a reasonably successful businessman, acting as a steward for the Earl of Worcester, among other occupations. Though his diary - which covers half a century - is little more than a list of events, these are often surprisingly interesting, as when Powell records, during the Civil War, ‘Trowps deuouring my hay’.

Walter Powell was born on born 25 March 1581, into a Welsh family that claimed to be of Norman origin. He married Margaret Evans in 1604, and initially they lived in Llanarth but then moved to Llantilio in 1611. Powell worked as a steward for the Earl of Worcester, and for some other estates. He also leased a mill, it seems, for at least two decades.

Powell died in 1655 (or 1656 according to the modern dating system), and is remembered largely because he left behind a diary. This was edited by Joseph Bradney and published by John Wright, Bristol, in 1907 as The Diary of Walter Powell of Llantilio, Crossenny in the County of Monmouth, Gentleman, 1603-1654. It is largely made up of single line entries recording events, but does provide information on his family, farming and estate work, and makes brief references to the effects of the Civil War. The full text is available at Internet Archive.

In his introduction Bradney says: ‘It might be wished that [Powell] had said more about the Civil Wars, and, in particular, the siege of Raglan. On the 25th of May, 1646, a few days before the siege began, he was committed to prison in Raglan Castle for an offence he does not name. The siege began on the 3rd of June, and on the 8th of June, on account of his age, he was allowed by Lord Worcester to depart, the besiegers also permitting him to go home. . . During his absence his house in Penrhos had been plundered by the Parliamentary forces. Safe at home again he settled down to business as though no disturbances were taking place in the kingdom, his diary containing the usual notes as to lending money, collecting rents, and attending sessions.’

Bradney also makes this comment: ‘It is worthy of note that his daughter Anne, who was bom at the vicarage 23 May, 1611, married her husband John Watkins 11 June, 1621, she being therefore only slightly over 10 years of age. Her husband was baptized 2 June, 1609, so that he was but a trifle over 12 years old, both younge as the Diarist observes.’

Here are a few verbatim entries from Powell’s diary, from 1611, being exactly four centuries ago, and from 1645-1646, during the Civil War.

1611
‘I removed from lanarth to the viccarage of lantilio gressenny to dwell 27 Apr.
and I had a graunt from mr Sterrell of the ffarme for 21 yeares 13 Maij.
My father fell sicke 5 Junij, & died 19 Junij
Sould the house & lands late Rosser d’d wayth to Wm Sr Hughe for 1ooli ijs 23 Jan’ij.
John Evans & my sister his wief came to liue togeather as man & wief 24 Jan’ij.’

1612
‘this was the greatest yeare of ffruite that eu’ i saw. I made 50 hogsheades of sider of the tieth of both p’ishes.’

1645
‘4 Apr’, Prince Rupert at Bergeveny
6 Apr’, received the sacram’t at lanarth
5 May, mr John Powell’s testam’t
15 May, Jo: Charles & Jane Wms maried.
24 May, Moore Jones was buried, Conisbye’s trowps deuouring my hay meadowes.
3 July, King Charles at Raglan & 10 July at Cardiff
18 July, the affray wth Grossem’t men for Stedda’s
19 July, I brought present to the kinge at Raglan
21 Julij, Howell Jones wief died & my children removed to lanvapley
2 Aug:, tieth demised to Rich: tho: d’d, & Phe’ d’d John.
1 Sept’, Rendevous at Perlleny, I was not there
2 sept’, siedge at hereff’ removed after 6 weekes
7 sept’. The king at Raglan againe
10 sept’, Bristow taken by the p’liam’t lost by Prince Rupert.
24 sept’, Edward John James Watkin died
2 octobr’, leeches vsed p’ Bray to me, & Chepstow was taken p’ p’hament.
13 & 14 octobr’, Washington at Bergeveny
20 octob’, my sonne Richard went to Bristow & 8 die was imprisoned at langely coming back.
24, my daughter margaret brought to bedd of her first sonne.
3 Novemb’, m’ris Bray at my house.
7 Novemb’, I myself removed to lyve in Penrose.
9 Novembr’, my daughter Blaunch died.
12 Novemb’, Elenor James widow buried
23 Novemb’, John Evans & An Young hurt at tregare
27, the p’liamt army at my house, Collonell Morgan coming from Gloucester towards Bergeveny.
12 decembr’, my wief removed to Penros to dwell.
18 decemb’, hereff’ taken p’ p’lam’t by Coll: Morgan.
19 decemb’, Valentine Jones lewis prison’ to Raglan.
17 Jan’ij, Tho: lewis my man’s father slayne.
16 m’cij, at Vske w’th maghen
14 m’cij, Collonell Charles P’ger2 at lanvapley to burne my hay.
19 m’che, I payd 28s at Raglan p’ muskett
23 m’cij, m’ris Nelson’s oxen plundered.
26 m’cij, hay burnt at lantilio by the souldiers of Monmoth.’

1646.
‘29 M’cij, I & my wief rec’ sacram’t at lanarth
1 Apr’, Tho: & Besse my serv’ts maried.
18, my sonne Richard abused at Grossemount by Bissley & Tho: Chr’; do’r Bray died.
10 May, Lucas hurt by Tho: James Jo: Howell.
17 May, I received the sacram’t at lanarth.
25 May, I was comitted prison’ at Raglan to the marshall of the Garison, where I remayned close till 8 Junij p’xo.
29 May, my house was plundered at Penros by the p’liament forces.
3 Junij, the siedge at Raglan began. Raglan yealded vpp 19 Augusti p’xo.
8 Junij, I was suffered to come out throughe the leaguer.
9 et 10 Julij, Wm loup at my house, & he allowed contribuc’on & quartering to Andr’ lewis & his sone.
sould black horse to Rich: Band 5li
21 Julij, at Vske contra g’ll’m p’ le taxac’ons
30 Julij, Goodrich castle taken for ye p’liamt
6 Aug., Gen’all ffayrfax came to the leaguer.
19 Aug:, Raglan Castle yealded vpp.
21 sept’, Charles came from Bristow to my house.
24 Sept’, I was at Sadlebow hill.’

‘Too many Chinks’

Today is the centenary of the birth of Ron Hubbard, the controversial figure who developed Dianetics and founded the Church of Scientology. In his day he had a huge following, and his church or cult grew at exponential rates, at least until undermined by legal and moral challenges, leading him to spend the last years of his life as a recluse. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he kept a diary through his life, but as a teenager he did write one when in the Far East, and campaigners against the cult have seized on those diaries to undermine his claims about the spiritual influence the trips had on the ideas that led to Dianetics and Scientology.

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on 13 March 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska. His father was in the navy for a while, and his mother worked as a clerk for the state government, but the family moved around a lot during Ronald’s childhood. During the last years of his schooling, he lived mostly with his grandparents in Helena, Montana, apart from some time in Guam, South Pacific, where his father was stationed. He studied civil engineering at George Washington University for a couple of years but then dropped out.

During the 1930s, Hubbard developed a skill at writing in various genres for pulp fiction magazines, particularly science fiction, and is said to have associated with writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. His first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades, was published in 1937, many more followed. During the late 1940s, Hubbard started publishing works about a system of mental health, called Dianetics. After his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health became a best-seller, he gave up fiction and focused on promoting Dianetics, writing more books, delivering many lectures and launching various research organisations. The Church of Scientology, founded by Hubbard in 1954, became the most popular and famous of these groups.

Hubbard’s ideas continued to be popular throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing many hundreds of churches, missions, and groups around the world with membership rising to six million. However, increasingly Scientology ran into all kinds of legal problems, and eventually Hubbard became a recluse living in various different locations around the world. He had married three times and had had seven children when he died of a stroke in 1986. Wikipedia has a very extensive and well-referenced biography, noting many of the contradictions between official Scientology versions of Hubbard’s life and the facts. For a Scientology view of the man see the official Ron Hubbard website, and for an alternative view see Russell Miller’s Bared-Faced Messiah (available on Chris Owen’s website) or A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack.

While still a teenager, Hubbard made two trips to China. Later the trips were to be mythologised as the source of some of the wisdom that went into the spiritualism in Dianetics and Scientology. But at the time, Hubbard was keeping a diary, and much is made of this by critics of Hubbard and Scientology’s stories about him. Here are three paragraphs from Wikipedia’s text summarising the two trips and the records of those trips in his diary. (The original source of the diary material is given by Atack in his book as ‘exhibits 62, 63, 65, Church of Scientology of California vs. Gerald Armstrong, Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, case no. C 420153’; and the photo of Hubbard’s diary is also taken from Atack’s book.)

‘Between 1927 and 1929 Hubbard traveled to Japan, China, the Philippines and Guam. Scientology texts present this period in his life as a time when he was intensely curious for answers to human suffering and explored ancient Eastern philosophies for answers, but found them lacking. He is described as traveling to China ‘at a time when few Westerners could enter’ and is said to have spent his time questioning Buddhist lamas and meeting old Chinese magicians. . . Hubbard’s unofficial biographers present a very different account of his travels in Asia. Hubbard’s diaries recorded two trips to the east coast of China. The first was made in the company of his mother while traveling from the United States to Guam in 1927. It consisted of a brief stop-over in a couple of Chinese ports before traveling on to Guam, where he stayed for six weeks before returning home. He recorded his impressions of the places he visited and disdained the poverty of the inhabitants of Japan and China, whom he described as ‘gooks’ and ‘lazy [and] ignorant’. . .

Between October and December 1928 a number of naval families, including Hubbard’s, traveled from Guam to China aboard the USS Gold Star. The ship stopped at Manila in the Philippines before traveling on to Qingdao (Tsingtao) in China. Hubbard and his parents made a side trip to Beijing before sailing on to Shanghai and Hong Kong, from where they returned to Guam. Scientology accounts present a different version of events, saying that Hubbard ‘made his way deep into Manchuria’s Western Hills and beyond - to break bread with Mongolian bandits, share campfires with Siberian shamans and befriend the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan.’

However, Hubbard did not record these events in his diary. He remained unimpressed with China and the Chinese, writing: ‘A Chinaman can not live up to a thing, he always drags it down.’ He characterized the sights of Beijing as ‘rubberneck stations’ for tourists and described the palaces of the Forbidden City as ‘very trashy-looking’ and ‘not worth mentioning’. He was impressed by the Great Wall of China near Beijing but concluded of the Chinese: ‘They smell of all the baths they didn’t take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.’ ’

If I had been a monster

Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of the great Ukrainian poet, artist and nationalist, Taras Shevchenko. He was exiled for a decade by the Tsar for subversive writings against Russian domination of Ukraine, and on being released started to keep a diary. This has been called a ‘living portrait of the implacable revolutionary’.

Shevchenko was born a serf in the village of Moryntsi, then in the Russian Empire (now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine) in 1814. He was orphaned at 11, and grew up in poverty, but was taught to read by a lay church person. From the age of 14, he worked as a houseboy for his owner, Pavel Engelhardt, in Vilnius and then St Petersburg. Having noticed a talent for drawing, though, Engelhardt apprenticed him to the painter V Shiriaev. Through him he met other Russian and Ukrainian artists, including the famous painter and professor Karl Briullov. A portrait of the Russian poet Vasilii Zhukovsky by Briullov was sold in a lottery to raise funds to buy Shevchenko’s freedom in 1838. That same year he enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg.

Shevchenko’s first collection of poetry - Kobzar - was published in 1840; epic poems and plays followed. In the mid-1840s, he made several trips to regions that are now modern Ukraine and, disturbed by the conditions he found there, produced an album of etchings of the historical and cultural ruins. Also, he began to write increasingly subversive material against the Tsarist regime. In 1847, he was arrested with others interested in bringing more freedom to Ukraine, and was exiled as a private with the Russian military Orenburg garrison at Orsk near the Ural Mountains. Tsar Nicholas I, confirming his sentence, added: ‘Under the strictest surveillance, without a right to write or paint.’

Shevchenko remained in exile for a decade, to 1857, though the Tsar’s ban on his artistic work was never more than lax, and he produced both sketches and writing during the period. In 1859, he was allowed to move to Ukraine, but then was arrested and ordered to return to St Petersburg. He continued to write poetry, etch and paint, but ill-health got the better of him, and he died on 10 March 1861. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, and at the Taras H Shevchenko Museum & Memorial (in Toronto), and Encyclopaedia of Ukraine.

Encyclopaedia of Ukraine provides this assessment: ‘Shevchenko has held a unique position in Ukrainian intellectual history, and the importance of his poetry for Ukrainian culture and society cannot be underestimated. His Kobzar marks the beginning of a new era in Ukrainian literature and in the development of the modern Ukrainian language. Through his poetry, Shevchenko legitimized the use of Ukrainian as a language of modern literature. His poems’ revolutionary and political content found resonance among other captive peoples. The earliest translations of his poems - mainly into Polish, Russian, Czech, and German - appeared while he was still alive. By the 1990s parts of the Kobzar had been translated into more than 100 languages. Shevchenko’s poetry has also become a source of inspiration for many other works of literature, music, and art.’

For less than two years, in 1857 and 1858, after being released from exile, Shevchenko kept a diary. The Encyclopaedia of Ukraine says ‘it is of great value in interpreting his poetic works and an important source for studying his intellectual interests and development.’ Yevhen Kirilyuk, a Member of the Academy of Science of Ukraine, wrote in 1961 that this diary is ‘a wonderful human document which provides us with a living portrait of the implacable revolutionary and the significance of the development of engineering and science, which would inevitably bring an end to the old order’. And Professor W K Matthews of the University of London wrote (in Forum magazine, 1989) that the diary is ‘particularly illuminating on the notable change in his psychology which was the inevitable outcome of ten physically and morally degrading years of exile in the Kazakh steppe.’

Matthews continues: ‘Like Shakespeare, another author with a defective early education, Shevchenko was an uncommonly sensitive and impressionable man, quick to learn, and able to transform acquired knowledge to his own use and to give it the stamp of his unique genius. A sober study of Shevchenko’s poetry convinces us of this, even though we can easily pick out its folk-song elements. But as we read his ‘Diary’ we continually marvel at the variety of his interests and information, the maturity of his understanding, his balanced judgment in the fields of literature and aesthetics, and his high moral standard. . .

What drew Shevchenko to the Russian revolutionaries in his latter days was an unrelenting hatred of established authority - both that of the landowners and that of the Russian government. These had been the twin sources of his miseries from his birth. And how intense those miseries could be we realize, for instance, from the pages of his Diary, in which he complained on 19th June, 1857: ‘If I had been a monster, a murderer, even than a more fitting punishment could not have been devised for me than that of sending me off as a private to the Special Orenburg Corps. It is here that you have the cause of my indescribable sufferings. And in addition to all this I am forbidden to sketch’. To these words he subsequently adds the scathing remark: ‘The heathen Augustus, banishing Naso to the savage Getae, did not forbid him to write or to sketch. Yet the Christian Nicholas forbade me both.’

A myriad of mountains

Xu Xiake died three hundred and seventy years ago today. He was an intrepid traveller exploring his native China with pen in hand, so to speak, recording the details of his journeys with literary flare and a romantic style. He also made significant geographical discoveries. Extracts (all too few of them) of his travel diaries are available in English in Julian Ward’s academic analysis - Xu Xiake (1587-1641) - The Art of Travel Writing.

Xu Xiake was born in today’s Jiangyin of East China’s Jiangsu Province. As a boy, he studied ancient classics but rather than taking the imperial exams, he developed an interest in history and travel books, and in travelling. During his lifetime, he journeyed with his servant Gu Xing all over China, mostly or very often on foot.

China Culture lists Xu Xiake’s main contributions to geography as: a detailed and scientific study of the karst landform; correcting some mistakes of the records on the source and waterways of Chinese rivers; observing and recording the species of many plants, explicitly putting forward the influences that landform, temperature, and wind speed might have on the distribution and blooming of plants; conducting a survey on the volcano relics of Tengchong Mountain; and a detailed depiction of the phenomenon of terrestrial heat, the earliest of its kind in China. He died on 8 March 1641. A little more biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Smithsonian Magazine.

Xu Xiake recorded his travels in great detail. These notes were later arranged by a friend and prepared as a manuscript, but this suffered through the ages and was only printed in 1776 when part was already lost. Not till 1928, was a modern version of the diaries printed, by the Commercial Press in Shanghai.

Julian Ward first saw a version of the diaries in Xi’an in 1988, and then decided to research them further for his PhD at Edinburgh University - An Analysis of Literary and Philosophical Aspects of the Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake (1587-1641) - completed in 1996. Subsequently, in 2001, Curzon Press published Ward’s Xu Xiake (1587-1641) - The Art of Travel Writing, which is an extensive academic analysis of Xu Xiake’s diaries, and, unfortunately, contains all too few substantial passages from the diaries themselves. After a chapter on ‘The History of Chinese Travel Writing’, other chapters focus on subjects such as ‘Coveting Strangeness’, ‘Old Certainties and New Discoveries’, ‘Mountains and Caves’. The extensive bibliography lists various Chinese language editions of his diaries, the earliest of which is the 1928 edition.

The following two paragraphs are extracted from Ward’s book:

‘The present text of Xu Xiake’s diaries has more than 600,000 characters, of which the early trips to famous mountains constitute 50,000 and the journey to southwest China well over 500,000 characters. Popular myths surrounding his method of writing have arisen from romantic descriptions in contemporary biographies, which played on the image of the sensitive man at one with Nature. . . [One biographer wrote:] ‘After travelling for several hundred li, he would clamber up a broken rock to a withered tree and burn pines in order to gather together some tassels. He would then dash of a record of his journey, which was as good as a writing manual or a great work of art, something which even the greatest writers could not have improved.’

For much of his long journey, Xu managed to write his diary entries on the day in question. There were also, however, several instances when he had to wait several days before finding an opportunity to write up his experiences. On one such occasion, at a temple in Guizhou, he elaborated: ‘Entering a hall to the rear, I went up to a clean table and, using the ink and paper I was carrying, proceeded to write up several days of my journey. The jumbled chaos of my lodging was no match for the cleanliness and exclusion of this place. The monk, Tanbo, was most solicitous, bringing me tea and snacks from time to time. In the afternoon, two big and two small elephants came by, stopping in front of the temple for a long time . . . I was quite intoxicated in drafting my diary.’ ’

And here are three further (undated) samples of the translated diary taken from Ward’s book.

In Hunan
‘Since Cold Water Bay, the mountains and the sky had opened out, broadening the field of vision, while on either bank of the river water-eating rocks hove in and out of view, each one a sensual and visual feast. On entering the Qiyang region, the rocks took on a strange form and a shining appearance: as we passed through the region, they gradually presented a lofty form till by the time we had reached here, they seemed to surge out of the earth. On entering Xiangkou, the mass of towering interwoven cliffs was transformed into precipitous cliffs, rearing up into the sky.’

In eastern Yunnan
‘At the front of the courtyard was a flowering cassia tree whose mysterious fragrance floated all round, filling up the distant hills and valleys. Previously when I had passed through the valley and circled the ridge I had marvelled at its scent, thinking it to be heavenly fragrance descending in the distance, never imagining it was produced by blossom. The sweet-smelling cassia and the colourful chrysanthemums made me think about this secluded region and I regretted there was no monk with whom I could share it.’

In Guizhou
‘Followed the mountain path to the northeast and entered a bamboo thicket: towering trees and layered cliffs, above and below mysterious, crossed crags and penetrated the azure, as if in another world. It was like this for five li, then the cliff to the west sloped down from the summit falling to great depths to create a valley, in the middle of which was a marsh of still water, dark and deep blue. Slid into the water from the base of the rocks, but there was no ebb or flow: it was a truly ancient secluded pool, hidden in the valleys of a myriad mountains.’