A fool’s paradise of poetry

‘Heavens! what fortitude one needs, to become a decent writer. One runs madly through green thickets, enamoured of the bird-notes which last but a few moments; one stumbles, picks oneself up, and emerges into a barren waste; one ruminates miserably for a while, dragging desolate feet through the dust of dead dreams. And then, if one is lucky, one plunges into another fool’s paradise of “poetry”.’ This is Siegfried Sassoon, an English poet born 140 years ago today, writing lyrically about the difficulties of composing poetry. Although a brave and decorated First World War soldier, he is best remembered for his war poetry and autobiographical prose, while his extensive diaries provide an unusually immediate record of his life and wartime experiences.

Sassoon was born at Weirleigh, near Matfield in Kent, on 8 September 1886, and educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge. He was the second of three sons born to Alfred Ezra Sassoon, a member of a wealthy Jewish merchant family, and Theresa Thornycroft, an Anglo-Catholic. Alfred had been disinherited by his family for marrying Theresa. After leaving Cambridge without a degree, Sassoon spent nearly a decade doing very little other than hunting, socialising and writing occasional verse. On the outbreak of war, he enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, but injured his arm in a riding accident in October 1914. After recovering, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion (Special Reserve), Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front. He was considered a reckless soldier, but was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded lance-corporal under heavy fire in May 1916.

Significantly, while in France, Sassoon met Robert Graves. They encouraged each other’s love of poetry, and Graves’s grittier style is known to have influenced Sassoon. In April 1917, Sassoon was wounded and returned to England. By then, he had grown hostile to the continuation of the war and his poetry increasingly reflected the realities of life in the trenches. The Old Huntsman, containing a substantial group of war poems, appeared in 1917, followed by Counter-Attack and Other Poems in 1918. On 15 June 1917, Sassoon completed A Soldier’s Declaration, condemning what he believed was the deliberate prolongation of the conflict. After he refused to return to duty, the statement was published in The Times and read in Parliament on 31 July. Some called for Sassoon to be court-martialled, but the Army instead sent him before a medical board, which declared him unfit for service and referred him to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There he met the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the poet Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon subsequently returned to active service, first in Palestine and then in France, where in June 1918 he was accidentally shot in the head by a British sentry. After the war, he lived briefly in Oxford, but then settled in Tufton Street, Westminster, in 1919. He became literary editor of the Daily Herald, a role that brought him into contact with many literary names of the day, and became something of a literary celebrity himself. He spent the best part of two decades writing autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books, such as Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Siegfried’s Journey. He married Hester Gatty in 1933, and they had one son before the marriage broke down and the couple separated in 1945. Sassoon lived the last years of his life in relative seclusion at Heytesbury in Wiltshire, converting to Catholicism in 1957. He died of stomach cancer on 1 September 1967, aged 80. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Poetry Foundation or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cambridge University Library holds what it describes as ‘the world’s richest assemblage of Sassoon’s manuscripts and archival papers’, including a run of diaries stretching from 1905 to 1959. The Cambridge Digital Library has made available images of 23 of Sassoon’s journals, focusing on the war years but covering 1915-1927 and 1931-1932. It describes Sassoon as a ‘gifted diarist’ and the journals as ‘a fascinating resource’ of First World War literature. However, the library does not provide complete transcriptions of the diary pages.

‘Unlike edited printed transcriptions,’ it says, ‘the digitisations allow the viewer to form a thorough sense of the nature of the physical documents. Sassoon wrote in a small but neat and legible hand, frequently using the notebooks from both ends. His war journals were used for a wide variety of purposes: in addition to making diary entries Sassoon drafted poetry, made pencil or ink sketches, listed members of his battalion and their fates, made notes on military briefings and diagrams of trenches, listed locations and dates of times spent at or near the Front, noted quotations, and transcribed letters. The wartime notebooks were small enough to have been carried by Sassoon in the pocket of his Army tunic, and many had enclosures such as letters tucked into the outer cover or inner pouches; some bear tangible evidence of use in the trenches, from the mud on notebook MS Add.9852/1/7 to the candlewax spilled on MS Add.9852/1/9, presumably as Sassoon sat writing in his dug-out by candlelight.’

Printed transcriptions are available in three volumes edited by Rupert Hart-Davis and published by Faber and Faber between 1981 and 1985: Diaries 1915-1918, Diaries 1920-1922 and Diaries 1923-1925 (all of which can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive). Here are several extracts from the last of these. Hart-Davis notes, however, that most of the text of Diaries 1923-1925 was taken from ‘fair copies’ Sassoon himself made of the original diaries in 1931 and 1932. It is assumed, he says, that the originals were discarded.

This article is a revised version of one first published on 8 September 2016.

10,000 houses in one flame

It is exactly 360 years since London was ravaged by the great fire of 1666. Astonishingly, two of the nation’s most important and earliest diarists - John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys - were there at the time, and writing their diaries. Here are their respective entries for the first few days of the tragedy. Evelyn’s text is taken from Volume II of William Bray’s edition of The Diary of John Evelyn (M. Walter Dunne, 1901). Pepys’s text is taken from Volume X of the Henry Wheatley edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Macmillan, 1895). For more on Evelyn see A most excellent person; for more Pepys see In celebration of Pepys; and for more on the Great Fire of London see Wikipedia or The Great Fire website.

Evelyn
2 September 1666
‘This fatal night, about ten, began the deplorable fire, near Fish street, in London.’

Pepys
2 September 1666
‘(Lord’s day). Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my night-gowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back-side of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off. So to my closett to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding-lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish-street already. So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steele-yard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs. ___ lives, and whereof my old schoolfellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, and there burned till it fell down: I to White Hall (with a gentleman with me who desired to go off from the Tower, to see the fire, in my boat); to White Hall, and there up to the King’s closett in the Chappell, where people come about me, and I did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way. The Duke of York bid me tell him that if he would have any more soldiers he shall; and so did my Lord Arlington afterwards, as a great secret. Here meeting with Captain Cocke, I in his coach, which he lent me, and Creed with me to Paul’s, and there walked along Watling-street, as well as I could, every creature coming away loaden with goods to save, and here and there sicke people carried away in beds. Extraordinary good goods carried in carts and on backs.

At last met my Lord Mayor in Canning-street, like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King’s message he cried, like a fainting woman, “Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.” That he needed no more soldiers; and that, for himself, he must go and refresh himself, having been up all night. So he left me, and I him, and walked home, seeing people all almost distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire. The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter for burning, as pitch and tarr, in Thames-street; and warehouses of oyle, and wines, and brandy, and other things. Here I saw Mr. Isaake Houblon, the handsome man, prettily dressed and dirty, at his door at Dowgate, receiving some of his brothers’ things, whose houses were on fire; and, as he says, have been removed twice already; and he doubts (as it soon proved) that they must be in a little time removed from his house also, which was a sad consideration. And to see the churches all filling with goods by people who themselves should have been quietly there at this time.

By this time it was about twelve o’clock; and so home, and there find my guests, which was Mr. Wood and his wife Barbary Sheldon, and also Mr. Moone : she mighty fine, and her husband, for aught I see, a likely man. But Mr. Moone’s design and mine, which was to look over my closett and please him with the sight thereof, which he hath long desired, was wholly disappointed; for we were in great trouble and disturbance at this fire, not knowing what to think of it. However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry as at this time we could be. While at dinner Mrs. Batelier come to enquire after Mr. Woolfe and Stanes (who, it seems, are related to them), whose houses in Fish-street are all burned, and they in a sad condition. She would not stay in the fright.

Soon as dined, I and Moone away, and walked through the City, the streets full of nothing but people and horses and carts loaden with goods, ready to run over one another, and removing goods from one burned house to another. They now removing out of Canning-streete (which received goods in the morning) into Lumbard-streete, and further; and among others I now saw my little goldsmith, Stokes, receiving some friend’s goods, whose house itself was burned the day after. We parted at Paul’s; he home, and I to Paul’s Wharf, where I had appointed a boat to attend me, and took in Mr. Carcasse and his brother, whom I met in the streete, and carried them below and above bridge to and again to see the fire, which was now got further, both below and above, and no likelihood of stopping it. Met with the King and Duke of York in their barge, and with them to Queenhithe, and there called Sir Richard Browne to them. Their order was only to pull down houses apace, and so below bridge at the water-side; but little was or could be done, the fire coming upon them so fast. Good hopes there was of stopping it at the Three Cranes above, and at Buttolph’s Wharf below bridge, if care be used; but the wind carries it into the City, so as we know not by the water-side what it do there. River full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and good goods swimming in the water, and only I observed that hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house in, but there was a pair of Virginalls in it.

Having seen as much as I could now, I away to White Hall by appointment, and there walked to St. James’s Parke, and there met my wife and Creed and Wood and his wife, and walked to my boat; and there upon the water again, and to the fire up and down, it still encreasing, and the wind great. So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water, we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us.

We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine. So home with a sad heart, and there find every body discoursing and lamenting the fire; and poor Tom Hater come with some few of his goods saved out of his house, which is burned upon Fish-streete Hill. I invited him to lie at my house, and did receive his goods, but was deceived in his lying there, the newes coming every moment of the growth of the fire; so as we were forced to begin to pack up our owne goods, and prepare for their removal; and did by moonshine (it being brave dry, and moonshine, and warm weather) carry much of my goods into the garden, and Mr. Hater and 1 did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place. And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts also there, and my tallys into a box by themselves. So great was our fear, as Sir W. Batten hath carts come out of the country to fetch away his goods this night. We did put Mr. Hater, poor man, to bed a little; but he got but very little rest, so much noise being in my house, taking down of goods.’

Evelyn
3 September 1666
‘I had public prayers at home. The fire continuing, after dinner, I took coach with my wife and son, and went to the Bankside in Southwark, where we beheld that dismal spectacle, the whole city in dreadful flames near the waterside; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames street, and upward toward Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed; and so returned, exceedingly astonished what would become of the rest 

The fire having continued all this night (if I may call that night which was light as day for ten miles round about, after a dreadful manner), when conspiring with a fierce eastern wind in a very dry season, I went on foot to the same place; and saw the whole south part of the city burning from Cheapside to the Thames, and all along Cornhill (for it likewise kindled back against the wind as well as forward), Tower street, Fenchurch street. Gracious street, and so along to Baynard’s Castle, and was now taking hold of St. Paul’s church, to which the scaffolds contributed exceedingly. The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished, that, from the beginning, I know not by what despondency, or fate, they hardly stirred to quench it; so that there was nothing heard, or seen, but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their goods; such a strange consternation there was upon them, so as it burned both in breadth and length, the churches, public halls, Exchange, hospitals, monuments, and ornaments; leaping after a prodigious manner, from house to house, and street to street, at great distances one from the other. For the heat, with a long set of fair and warm weather, had even ignited the air, and prepared the materials to conceive the fire, which devoured, after an incredible manner, houses, furniture, and every thing. 

Here, we saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges and boats laden with what some had time and courage to save, as, on the other side, the carts, etc., carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strewn with movables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle! such as haply the world had not seen since the foundation of it, nor can be outdone till the universal conflagration thereof. All the sky was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame! The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm; and the air all about so hot and inflamed, that at the last one was not able to approach it, so that they were forced to stand still, and let the flames burn on, which they did, for near two miles in length and one in breadth. The clouds also of smoke were dismal, and reached, upon computation, near fifty miles in length. Thus, I left it this afternoon burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day. It forcibly called to my mind that passage - “non enim his habemus stabilein civitatem”; the ruins resembling the picture of Troy. London was, but is no more! Thus, I returned.’

Pepys
3 September 1666
‘About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did, riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart; and, Lord! to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding, and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things. I find Sir W. Rider tired with being called up all night, and receiving things from several friends. His house full of goods, and much of Sir W. Batten’s and Sir W. Pen’s. I am eased at my heart to have my treasure so well secured. Then home, with much ado to find a way, nor any sleep all this night to me nor my poor wife. But then and all this day she and I, and all my people labouring to get away the rest of our things, and did get Mr. Tooker to get me a lighter to take them in, and we did carry them (myself some) over Tower Hill, which was by this time full of people’s goods, bringing their goods thither; and down to the lighter, which lay at the next quay, above the Tower Docke. And here was my neighbour’s wife, Mrs. ___, with her pretty child, and some few of her things, which I did willingly give way to be saved with mine; but there was no passing with any thing through the postern, the crowd was so great.

The Duke of Yorke come this day by the office, and spoke to us, and did ride with his guard up and down the City to keep all quiet (he being now Generall, and having the care of all). This day, Mercer being not at home, but against her mistress’s order gone to her mother’s, and my wife going thither to speak with W. Hewer, met her there, and was angry; and her mother saying that she was not a ‘prentice girl, to ask leave every time she goes abroad, my wife with good reason was angry, and, when she came home, bid her be gone again. And so she went away, which troubled me, but yet less than it would, because of the condition we are in, fear of coming into in a little time of being less able to keepe one in her quality. At night lay down a little upon a quilt of W. Hewer’s in the office, all my owne things being packed up or gone; and after me my poor wife did the like, we having fed upon the remains of yesterday’s dinner, having no fire nor dishes, nor any opportunity of dressing any thing.’

Evelyn
4 September 1666
‘The burning still rages, and it is now gotten as far as the Inner Temple. All Fleet street, the Old Bailey, Ludgate hill, Warwick lane, Newgate, Paul’s chain, Watling street, now flaming, and most of it reduced to ashes; the stones of Paul’s flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them, and the demolition had stopped all the passages, so that no help could be applied. The eastern wind still more impetuously driving the flames forward. Nothing but the Almighty power of God was able to stop them; for vain was the help of man.’

Pepys
4 September 1666
‘Up by break of day to get away the remainder of my things; which I did by a lighter at the Iron gate: and my hands so few, that it was the afternoon before we could get them all away. Sir W. Pen and I to Tower-streete, and there met the fire burning three or four doors beyond Mr. Howell’s, whose goods, poor man, his trayes, and dishes, shovells, &c., were flung all along Tower-street in the kennels, and people working therewith from one end to the other; the fire coming on in that narrow streete, on both sides, with infinite fury. Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things. The Duke of Yorke was at the office this day, at Sir W. Pen’s; but I happened not to be within. This afternoon, sitting melancholy with Sir W. Pen in our garden, and thinking of the certain burning of this office, without extraordinary means, I did propose for the sending up of all our workmen from Woolwich and Deptford yards (none whereof yet appeared), and to write to Sir W. Coventry to have the Duke of Yorke’s permission to pull down houses, rather than lose this office, which would much hinder the King’s business. So Sir W. Pen he went down this night, in order to the sending them up to-morrow morning; and I wrote to Sir W. Coventry about the business, but received no answer.

This night Mrs. Turner (who, poor woman, was removing her goods all this day, good goods into the garden, and knows not how to dispose of them), and her husband supped with my wife and I at night, in the office, upon a shoulder of mutton from the cook’s, without any napkin or any thing, in a sad manner, but were merry. Only now and then walking into the garden, and saw how horridly the sky looks, all on a fire in the night, was enough to put us out of our wits; and, indeed, it was extremely dreadful, for it looks just as if it was at us, and the whole heaven on fire.

I after supper walked in the darke down to Tower-streete, and there saw it all on fire, at the Trinity House on that side, and the Dolphin Taverne on this side, which was very near us; and the fire with extraordinary vehemence. Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than any thing; but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it, though it kindled nothing almost. W. Hewer this day went to see how his mother did, and comes late home, telling us how he hath been forced to remove her to Islington, her house in Pye-corner being burned; so that the fire is got so far that way, and all the Old Bayly, and was running down to Fleete-streete; and Paul’s is burned, and all Cheapside. I wrote to my father this night, but the post-house being burned, the letter could not go.’

Evelyn
5 September 1666 
‘It crossed toward Whitehall; but oh! the confusion there was then at that Court! It pleased his Majesty to command me, among the rest, to look after the quenching of Fetter-lane end, to preserve (if possible) that part of Holborn, while the rest of the gentlemen took their several posts, some at one part, and some at another (for now they began to bestir themselves, and not till now, who hitherto had stood as men intoxicated, with their hands across), and began to consider that nothing was likely to put a stop but the blowing up of so many houses as might make a wider gap than any had yet been made by the ordinary method of pulling them down with engines. This some stout seamen proposed early enough to have saved near the whole city, but this some tenacious and avaricious men, aldermen, etc., would not permit, because their houses must have been of the first. It was, therefore, now commended to be practiced; and my concern being particularly for the Hospital of St. Bartholomew, near Smithfield, where I had many wounded and sick men, made me the more diligent to promote it; nor was my care for the Savoy less. It now pleased God, by abating the wind, and by the industry of the people, when almost all was lost infusing a new spirit into them, that the fury of it began sensibly to abate about noon, so as it came no farther than the Temple westward, nor than the entrance of Smithfield, north: but continued all this day and night so impetuous toward Cripplegate and the Tower, as made us all despair. It also broke out again in the temple; but the courage of the multitude persisting, and many houses being blown up, such gaps and desolations were soon made, as, with the former three days’ consumption, the back fire did not so vehemently urge upon the rest as formerly. There was yet no standing near the burning and glowing ruins by near a furlong’s space. 

The coal and wood wharfs, and magazines of oil, rosin, etc. , did infinite mischief, so as the invective which a little before I had dedicated to his Majesty and published, giving warning what probably might be the issue of suffering those shops to be in the city was looked upon as a prophecy.

The poor inhabitants were dispersed about St. George’s Fields, and Moorfields, as far as Highgate, and several miles in circle, some under tents, some under miserable huts and hovels, many without a rag, or any necessary utensils, bed or board, who from delicateness, riches, and easy accommodations in stately and well-furnished houses, were now reduced to extreme misery and poverty. 

In this calamitous condition, I returned with a sad heart to my house, blessing and adoring the distinguishing mercy of God to me and mine, who, in the midst of all this ruin, was like Lot, in my little Zoar, safe and sound.’ 

Pepys
5 September 1666
‘I lay down in the office again upon W. Hewer’s quilt, being mighty weary, and sore in my feet with going till I was hardly able to stand. About two in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cryes of fire, it being come to Barkeing Church, which is the bottom of our lane. I up, and finding it so, resolved presently to take her away, and did, and took my gold, which was about £2,350, W. Hewer, and Jane, down by Proundy’s boat to Woolwich; but, Lord! what a sad sight it was by moone-light to see the whole City almost on fire, that you might see it plain at Woolwich, as if you were by it. There, when I come, I find the gates shut, but no guard kept at all, which troubled me, because of discourse now begun, that there is plot in it, and that the French had done it. I got the gates open, and to Mr. Shelden’s, where I locked up my gold, and charged my wife and W. Hewer never to leave the room without one of them in it, night or day. So back again, by the way seeing my goods well in the lighters at Deptford, and watched well by people.

Home, and whereas I expected to have seen our house on fire, it being now about seven o’clock, it was not. But to the fyre, and there find greater hopes than I expected; for my confidence of finding our Office on fire was such, that I durst not ask any body how it was with us, till I come and saw it not burned. But going to the fire, I find by the blowing up of houses, and the great helpe given by the workmen out of the King’s yards, sent up by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it, as well as at Marke-lane end as ours; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and was there quenched. I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afeard to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W. Pen’s, and there eat a piece of cold meat, having eaten nothing since Sunday, but the remains of Sunday’s dinner.

Here I met with Mr. Young and Whistler; and having removed all my things, and received good hopes that the fire at our end is stopped, they and I walked into the town, and find Fanchurch-streete, Gracious-streete, and Lumbard-streete all in dust. The Exchange a sad sight, nothing standing there, of all the statues or pillars, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the corner. Walked into Moorefields (our feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles), and find that full of people, and poor wretches carrying their goods there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves (and a great blessing it is to them that it is fair weather for them to keep abroad night and day); drank there, and paid twopence for a plain penny loaf. Thence homeward, having passed through Cheapside and Newgate Market, all burned, and seen Anthony Joyce’s house in fire. And took up (which I keep by me) a piece of glasse of Mercers’ Chappell in the streete, where much more was, so melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment. I also did see a poor cat taken out of a hole in the chimney, joyning to the wall of the Exchange, with the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive.

So home at night, and find there good hopes of saving our office; but great endeavours of watching all night, and having men ready; and so we lodged them in the office, and had drink and bread and cheese for them. And I lay down and slept a good night about midnight, though when I rose I heard that there had been a great alarme of French and Dutch being risen, which proved nothing. But it is a strange thing to see how long this time did look since Sunday, having been always full of variety of actions, and little sleep, that it looked like a week or more, and I had forgot almost the day of the week.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 5 September 2016.

A sensitive and nervous man

Bret Harte, an American writer best remembered for his prose, particularly short stories about the Californian gold rush, and satirical poetry, was born 190 years ago today. He kept a diary for a few short months when a young man, but biographers tend to find more useful the diary of Annie Fields, wife of The Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields. She described Harte as a sensitive and nervous man.

Harte was born on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, into a family, originally Jewish immigrants. He seems to have left school at 13, and moved to California a few years later, where he worked in a variety of jobs. Having tried to make a living in the gold mining towns, he became a messenger for the Wells Fargo stagecoach company, guarding treasure boxes, before trying his hand as a teacher first then as a journalist. While working for the Northern Californian, he condemned the 1860 massacre of Wiyot people at Tuluwat; threats against him may have contributed to his decision to leave the area for San Francisco.”

In 1860, Harte began working for The Golden Era and contributed to its increasingly literary character; and in 1862 he married Anna Griswold. By this time, he was publishing poetry, romantic short stories about the Californian Gold Rush, as well as satirical prose. Some of his work was taken up by The Atlantic Monthly, edited by James Thomas Fields. In 1868, he became editor of the new literary magazine, Overland Monthly, which, two years later, published his poem Plain Language from Truthful James or, as it was better known, The Heathen Chinee. This narrative poem, satirising anti-Chinese sentiment, was widely republished, bringing Harte considerable fame. In search of furthering his literary career he moved to New York, and then Boston, and became contracted, at a high salary, to The Atlantic Monthly. His popularity did not last long, and by the end of 1872 the contract was over, and selling stories was becoming increasingly difficult.

Life remained tough for Harte until, in 1878, he went alone to Germany to take a position as US commercial agent in Krefeld, and then, in 1880, as US consul in Glasgow, UK. Though he wrote to his family (Anna and four children) and continued to support them, he never returned to the US (nor did they visit him in Europe). In 1885, he moved to London, where he continued to pursue his literary ambitions. He died in 1902. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Poem Hunter, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Harte kept a diary for a few months in 1857-1858. Bret Harte (American Book Company, 1941) by Joseph B. Harrison quotes from it but once. Gary Scharnhorst, in Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), provides an extract from 31 December 1857: ‘Before I close this Journal containing but a small portion of last years doings let me indulge in a retrospect. I am at the commencement of this year - a teacher at a Salary of $25 per mo - last year at this time I was unemployed. Last year I thought I was in love - this year I think the same tho the object is a different one. ... I have added to my slight stock of experiences and have suffered considerable. Ah! well did the cynical Walpole say life is a comedy to those who think - a tragedy to those who feel. - I both think and feel. My life is a mixture of broad caricature and farce when I think of others, it is a melodrama when I feel for myself. In these 365 days I have again put forth a feeble essay toward fame and perhaps fortune. - I have tried literature albeit in an humble way - successfully - I have written some poetry: passable and some prose (good) which have been published. . . . Therefore I consecrate this year or as much as God may grant for my service - to honest heartfelt sincere labor and devotion to this occupation. - God help me - may I succeed.’

Axel Nissen, in his biography, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), refers to Harte’s diary more often but notes that he made his last entry on 5 March 1858. Here are two paragraphs of Nissen’s text, largely sourced on Harte’s diary.

‘Each day he would conscientiously record the day’s lessons in his diary, in addition to his own quotidian activities. One day was much like the other: school in the morning Monday through Saturday, a trip to town in the afternoon or a shooting expedition, alone or with one of the boys. During the five months Harte kept the diary, he painstakingly recorded every duck, meadowlark, teal, widgeon, and ring-necked and buttheaded plover he brought down. It was almost an obsession. Rain or shine, sick or well, he tramped out to the marshes with his gun after school, sometimes also in the morning before breakfast. On December 10, for example, he recorded that he shot a duck (“but couldn’t get him”), a teal, and a snipe, and remarked with evident satisfaction: “I am improving in my skill, and of late have made good success [one word illegible] shooting. However I must try to persevere in other things.” His hunting expeditions were an escape from the claustrophobia of living among strangers and gave him time to think. He got himself a dog. Bones, to keep him company. The diary gives us an impression of a sober, serious-minded, industrious, and critical young man - early to bed and early to rise - thoughtful and a mite restless in his country isolation.’

‘But there was also a darker side to his existence. The diary gives ample evidence of depression and even despair. Only a few days after moving in with the Liscombs, he came home from Sunday service “very blue and discontented.” A month later, on Thanksgiving, there was a dancing party in town. Everyone was there; Harte tried to dance, found he couldn’t, and was ‘‘very much annoyed.” He came home “incontinently” in the pouring rain and spent a restless night. Christmas Day was even worse. He helped Maggie prepare the meal, and they had Christmas dinner with the Martins and her in-laws. He was feeling quite melancholy by this point, and attendance at a dance in the evening only made it worse. ‘‘What the d....d am I to do with myself,” he scratched down desperately in his diary, ‘‘the simplest pleasures fail to please me - my melancholy and gloomy foreboding stick to me closer than a brother. I cannot enjoy myself rationally like others but am forced to make a gloomy spectacle of myself to gods and men.” The “thermometer of my spirits,” as he analyzed it that day, had started at 40 degrees temperate in the morning, risen to eighty by 3 P.M., fallen all the way down to zero by 9 P.M., and by 1 A.M., he was still awake and twenty below.’

Harte’s biographers have also drawn on the published diary of the wife of the editor of The Atlantic Monthly: Annie Fields - Memories of a hostess: A chronicle of eminent friendships, drawn chiefly from the diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922). Here are several extracts about Harte.

5 September 1871
‘J. went to Boston. I wrote in the pastures and walked all the morning. Coming home, after dinner, came a telegram for me to meet J. and Bret Harte at Beverly station with the pony carriage. I drove hard to catch the train, but arrived in season, glad to take up the two good boys and show them Beverly shore. [. . .] Mr. Harte had much to say of the beautiful flowers of California, roses being in bloom about his own house there every month in the year. He found the cloudless skies and continued drought of California very hard to bear. For the first time in my life I considered how terrible perpetual cloudlessness would be! He thinks there is no beauty in the mountains of California, hard, bare, snowless peaks. Neither are there trees, nor any green grass.

He is delighted with the fragrant lawns of Newport and has, I believe, put into verse a delightful ghost story which he told us. He has taken a house of some antiquity in Newport, connected with which is the story of a lady who formerly lived there and who was very fond of the odor of mignonette. The flower was always growing in her house, and after her death, at two o’clock every night, a strong odor has always been perceived passing through the house as if wafted along by the garments of a woman. One night at the appointed hour, but entirely unconnected in his thought with the story Mr. Harte had long ago heard, he was arrested in his work by a strong perfume of mignonette which appeared to sweep by him. He looked about, thinking his wife might have placed a vase of flowers in the room, but finding nothing he began to follow the odor, which seemed to flit before him. Then he recalled, for the first time, the story he had heard. He opened the door; the odor was in the hall; he opened the room where the lady died, but there was no odor there; until returning, after making a circuit of the house, he found a faint perfume as if she had passed but not stayed there also. At last, somewhat oppressed perhaps by the ghostliness of the place and hour, he went out and stood upon the porch. There his dream vanished. The sweet lawn and tree flowers were emitting an odor, as is common at the hour when dews congeal, more sweet than at any other time of day or night, and the air was redolent of sweets which might easily be construed into mignonette. The story was well told and I shall be glad to see his poem. [. . .]

Mr. Harte is a very sensitive and nervous man. He struggles against himself all the time. He sat on the piazza with J. and talked till a late hour. This morning at breakfast I found him most interesting. He talked of his early and best-loved books. It appears that at the age of nine he was a lover and reader of Montaigne. Certain writers, he says, seem to him to stand out as friends and brothers side by side in literature. Now Horace and Montaigne are so associated in his mind. Mr. Emerson, he thinks, never in the least approaches a comprehension of the character of the man. With an admiration for his great sayings, he has never guessed at the subtle springs from which they come. The pleasant acceding to both sides in politics, and other traits of like nature, gives him affinity with Hawthorne. By the way, he is a true appreciator of Hawthorne. He was moved to much merriment yesterday by remembering a passage in the notes, where he slyly remarks, “Margaret Fuller’s cows hooked the other cows.” Speaking of Dr. Bartol, he said, “What a dear old man he is! A venerable baby, nothing more.” But Harte is most kindly and tender. His wife has been very ill and has given him cause for terrible anxiety. This accounts for much left undone, but he is an oblivious man oftentimes to his surroundings - leaves things behind!!’

12 January 1872
‘Bret Harte was here at breakfast. It is curious to see his feeling with regard to society. For purely literary society, with its affectations and contempts, he has no sympathy. He has at length chosen New York as his residence, and among the Schuylers, Sherwoods, and their friends he appears to find what he enjoys. There is evidently a gene about people and life here, and provincialisms which he found would hurt him. He is very sensitive and keen, with a love and reverence for Dickens almost peculiar in this coldly critical age. Bryant he finds very cold and totally unwilling to lead the conversation, as he should do when they are together, as he justly remarks, he being so much younger - but never a word without cart and horses to fetch it. Bret Harte has a queer absent-minded way of spending his time, letting the hours slip by as if he had not altogether learned their value yet. It is a miracle to us how he lives, for he writes very little. Thus far I suppose he has had money from J. R. O. & Co., but I fancy they have done with giving out money save for a quid pro quo.’

18 September 1875
‘Bret Harte came on the 1⁄2 past 12 train. He came in good health, save a headache which ripened as the day went on; but he was bubbling over with fun, full of the most natural and unexpected sallies. He wished to know if I was acquainted with the Cochin China hen. They had one at Cohasset. They had named him Benventuro (after a certain gay Italian singer of strong self-appreciation who came formerly to America). He said this hen’s state of mind on finding a half-exploded fire-cracker and her depressed condition since its explosion was something extraordinary. His description was so vivid that I still see this hen perambulating about the house, first with pride, second with precipitation, fallen into disgrace among her fellows. He said Cohasset was not the place to live in the summer if one wanted sea-breezes. They all came straight from Chicago!! He fancied the place, thinking it an old fishing village, not unlike Yarmouth. Instead of which they prided themselves upon never having “any of your sea-smells,” and, being five miles from the doctor, could not be considered a cheerful place to live in with sick children. He said he was surprised to find J. T. F. without a sailor’s jacket and collar. The actors among whom he had been living rather overdid the business; their collars were wider, their shirts fuller, and their trousers more bulgy than those of any real sailor he had ever observed, and the manner of hitching up the trousers was entirely peculiar to themselves and to the stage. [. . .]

Harte said in speaking of Longfellow that no one had yet overpraised him. The delicate quality of humor, the exquisite fineness in the choice of words, the breadth and sweetness of his nature were something he could hardly help worshipping. One day after a dinner at Mr. Lowell’s he said, “I think I will not have a carriage to return to town. I will walk down to the Square.” “I will walk with you,” said Longfellow. When they arrived at his gate, he said, he was so beautiful that he could only think of the light and whiteness of the moon, and if he had stayed a moment longer he should have put his arms around him and made a fool of himself then and there. Whereat he said good night abruptly and turned away.

He brought his novel and play with him which are just now finished, for us to read. He has evidently enjoyed the play, and he enjoys the fame and the money they both bring him.

He is a dramatic, lovable creature with his blue silk pocket-handkerchief and red dressing slippers and his quick feelings. I could hate the man who could help loving him - or the woman either.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 25 August 2016.

I love it in the shed

‘I love it in the shed . . . I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.’ This is Roger Deakin, author and environmentalist who died 20 years ago today, writing in a notebook he kept during the last years of his life. 

Deakin was born in Watford in 1943 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the only child of railway clerk Cyril Deakin and his wife Doris. His father died when he was 17. Deakin was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. After graduating, he worked as a teacher and then in advertising, while also making films and radio programmes. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm at Mellis in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse surrounded by meadows and a moat, which he restored and where he lived for the rest of his life.

Deakin became closely involved in environmental campaigning and was one of the founders, in 1983, of Common Ground, an organisation concerned with local landscape, culture and environmental distinctiveness. He continued to work in advertising, broadcasting and documentary production, making programmes for the BBC and other organisations. His first book, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, appeared in 1999, following a journey inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. Deakin travelled around Britain swimming in rivers, lakes, canals, lidos, the sea and other stretches of open water.

After Waterlog, Deakin began travelling and researching a book about trees and wood, visiting places including France, Greece, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as many parts of Britain. He completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees shortly before his death. Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006, he died at Walnut Tree Farm on 19 August that year, aged 63. Wikipedia, The Outdoor Swimming Society, The Guardian, and University of East Anglia. 

During the last six years of his life, Deakin also kept a detailed record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. He filled 45 lined exercise books in his distinctive handwriting, numbering and paginating each one and putting a table of contents on its cover. The entries included observations of the countryside around Walnut Tree Farm, accounts of everyday activities and encounters, memories, travel notes and material gathered for his books and radio programmes.

After his death, extracts from the notebooks were edited by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008 as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (which can be sampled at Googlebooks).. Rather than reproducing the notebooks chronologically, the editors selected entries from different years and arranged them month by month to create a single composite year. Abbreviations were expanded, but otherwise the published extracts retained Deakin’s words. The following three entries are taken from that volume (though none can be dated to a particular year).

9 January

‘A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.’

15 February

Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.

Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.

There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.

There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.

There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’. Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.

Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.

Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.’

18 February

‘I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.

I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.

Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.

None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.’

The concept of decadence

‘[In] literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres.’ This is from the diary of Bertolt Brecht, one of Germany’s most important 20th century playwrights who died 60 years ago today.

Eugen Berthold Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, into a mixed Catholic/Protestant family. He was educated at Königliches Realgymnasium, and then avoided the army by enrolling as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he also studied theatre. He never finished training as a doctor but did do some military service as a medical orderly. During the war, though, he had begun to write newspaper articles, under the name Bert Brecht, and he wrote his first play, Baal, in 1918, but it was not produced until 1923. He became increasingly involved in the theatre and cabaret world, being much influenced by the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht’s first produced play - Drums in the Night - was premiered in 1922 to rave reviews.

In 1917, Brecht had begun an affair with Paula Banholzer, who had a child, Frank, by him. In 1922, he married the actress Marianne Zoff, and they had a daughter, Hanne, though that relationship soon broke down, and, in 1924, he had a son, Stefan, with Helene Weigel. Five years later, he married Weigel, and they had a second child, Barbara, who would eventually inherit the copyright to all of Brecht’s literary works.

In 1919, Brecht became associated with the Independent Social Democratic Party, and become friends with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger. By 1924, they had collaborated on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II - the first of many classic texts Brecht would adapt. The same year, he went to work at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin - then one of the world’s leading theatres. He produced many well-received plays, not least The Threepenny Opera, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera with the composer Kurt Weill. Around this time, Brecht also published his first book of poems. In the early 1920s, Brecht started using the first name Bertolt, to rhyme with that of his collaborator, the playwright Arnolt Bronnen.

Brecht had long been a student of Marxism, but, by the mid-1920s this interest was leading him to write political dramas such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogony, also with Weill. After Hitler came to power, Brecht fled Germany in 1933, first to Scandinavia, settling on the Danish island of Funen, then, in 1941, to California, writing poems and plays (such as Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children) all the while. After the war, in 1947, he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but left the following day to return to Europe.

After staying in Switzerland to begin with, Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he launched the celebrated Berliner Ensemble, but he wrote few plays in his last years, focusing more on directing and teaching young directors and playwrights. In 1955, he received the Stalin Peace Prize, and, the following year, he died on 14 August. Further information is available from Wikipedia or Encyclopædia Britannica.

Brecht seems to have kept a diary in childhood, although only one journal - the so-called Diary 10 written in 1913 (but which refers to earlier diaries) - appears to have survived (for more on this see Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker at Googlebooks). He kept a diary in his early 20s: Bertolt Brecht Diaries 1920-1922, edited by Herta Ramthun, translated and annotated by John Willett, published by Eyre Methuen, 1979. And again he kept a diary from 1938 until the end of his life (though he recorded little in his last years): Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934-1956, translated by Hugh Rorrison, edited by John Willett, and published by Methuen, in 1993. A review in New Statesman and Society of the latter, quoted by the publisher, described the book as ‘a marvellous, motley collage of political ideas, domestic detail, artistic debate, poems, photographs and cuttings from newspapers and magazines’. Here are several extracts.

24 July 1938
‘there are concepts which are difficult to defend because they spread such boredom whenever they arise, like DÉCADENCE. there is naturally such a thing as the literature of the decline of a class, in it the class loses its serene certainty, its calm self-confidence, it conceals its difficulties, it gets bogged down in detail, it becomes parasitically culinary, etc. but the very works which identify its decline as a decline can scarcely be classed as decadent. but that is how the declining class views them, on the other hand the FEAST OF TRIMALCHIO exhibits all sorts of signs of formal decadence. and if ELECTIVE AFFINITIES is not decadent, WERTHER is.’

15 August 1938
‘FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH has NOW gone to press. lukács has already welcomed the spy as if i were a sinner returned to the bosom of the salvation army. here at last is something taken straight from life! he overlooks the montage of 27 scenes, and the fact that it is actually only a table of gests, the gest of keeping your mouth shut, the gest of looking about you, the gest of sudden fear etc. the pattern of gests in a dictatorship. now epic theatre can show that both ‘intérieurs’ and almost naturalistic elements are within its range, that they do not make the crucial difference. the actor will be well advised to study the STREET SCENE before playing one of the short scenes. the aforesaid gests are not to be performed in such a way that the audience wants to stop the scene, empathy is to be sedulously controlled, otherwise the whole thing is a dead loss. the montage, a process that has been so thoroughly condemned, arose here out of letters from dudow who needed something for his little proletarian theatre-group in paris. so the proletarian theatre in exile is keeping the theatre alive. while in moscow maxim vallentin, the one-time director of a berlin agitprop group, has gone over to bourgeois theatre and announced that in art an appeal has to be made to the emotions, which can only mean reason has to be switched off.’

18 August 1938
‘by offering only formal criteria for realism LUKÁCS, whose significance is that he writes from moscow, is in the final estimate handing readers who are avid to learn on a plate to those famous contemporary bourgeois novelists on whom he has bestowed great, if slightly embarrassed compliments, because they display the said formal features (even if they are not so ‘happy’, ‘pure’ and ‘creative’ as the old masters of the great early period). they become his realists (he allays any suspicion by contrasting them with a form of ‘decadence’, to which DOS passos and presumably i too belong), whose descriptions exclude the class struggle (‘do not not take sufficiently into account’, ‘do not yet fully encompass’), so that the reader himself then has to unravel the complicated reflections which the ‘decadents’ incorporate in their books, the very reflections which establish that the events depicted derive from the class struggle. they all display LUKÁCS’S hallmarks, HEINRICH MANN presents such a ‘tangle’ of different human fates in his HENRI QUATRE that nobody can find his way around in it, and doesn’t his brother THOMAS unfold the ‘whole life of the biblical joseph’ in all its ultimate fullness! in HAMSUN we have ‘very involved, very indirect relationships’ by the dozen, the class struggle is less in evidence in all three, but naturally we can add that for ourselves, for ‘in the last resort’ everything is class struggle, such obtuseness is monumental.’

10 September 1938
‘in literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres. it would be stupid for him to refuse to recognise decline in the artistic sphere. eg literature cannot exclude the great shackling of productive capacity by the capitalist means of production. i am restricting myself in the first instance to my own production. my first book of poems, the DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME, is undoubtedly branded with the decadence of the bourgeois class. under its wealth of feeling lies a confusion of feeling. under its originality of expression lie aspects of collapse. under the richness of its subject matter there is an element of aimlessness,. the powerful language is slack. etc etc. seen in this light the subsequent SVENDBORG POEMS represent both a withdrawal and an advance. from the bourgeois point of view there has been a staggering impoverishment. isn’t it all a great deal more one-sided, less ‘organic’, cooler, ‘more self-conscious’ (in a bad sense)? let’s hope my comrades-in-arms will not let that go by default, they will say the SVENDBORG POEMS are less decadent than DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME. however i think it is important that they should realise what the advance, such as it is, has cost. capitalism has forced us to take up arms. it has laid waste our surroundings. i no longer go off ‘to commune with nature in the woods’, but accompanied by two policemen. there is still richness, a rich choice of battlefields. there is originality, originality of problems. no question about it: literature is not blooming. but we have to beware of thinking in terms of outdated images. this notion of bloom is too one-sided. you can’t harness ideas of value, definitions of power and greatness, to an idyllic conception of organic flowering; it would be ridiculous. withdrawal and advance are not separated according to dates in the calendar. they are threads which run through individuals and works.’

7 October 1938
‘the fall of Czechoslovakia is remarkable for the way it happened. eg people continue to speak about that country as if it were still the same, and for that reason some of its actions are surprising. people have understood that it has to hand over something to germany, but now it is handing over more, in fact everything as far as everybody is concerned. including the jews and refugees. people forget that this defeat has brought different class forces to the helm, so the state has become a different person in law, one can no longer speak of czechoslovakia. and how did this come about? ‘england’ could not enter into a war which its russian ally would have won. the russian ally could not enter into a war which the russian generals would have won. france could not enter into a war which the popular front would have won. and none of them, naturally, could lose a war.’

23 November 1938
‘finished LIFE OF GALILEO. it took three weeks. the only difficulties arose with the last scene. just as in the case of ST JOAN, i needed a neat stroke at the end to ensure that the audience had the necessary detachment. even somebody empathising without thinking must now feel the a-effect when he empathises with galileo. with rigidly epic presentation an acceptable empathy occurs.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 August 2016.

All sorts of absurdities

‘About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover Street, & how he found out the “medium”, a late Liverpool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities.’ This is from the diaries of Anthony Hewitson, a provincial journalist born 190 years ago today. His diaries - which are free to read online - are considered a rare first hand resource for studying journalism in mid-victorian Britain.

Hewitson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on 13 August 1836, and was brought up largely in Ingleton by his grandparents. In 1850, aged 14, he moved to Lancaster to begin a seven-year apprenticeship as a compositor on the Lancaster Gazette. He taught himself shorthand and, while still an apprentice, began reporting for the Gazette and sending material to other newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian. After completing his apprenticeship he worked briefly on newspapers in Kendal and Wolverhampton before moving to Preston. In September 1858 he married Margaret Wilson, the daughter of a Lancaster tailor and draper, with whom he was to have a large family.

Hewitson worked successively for several Preston newspapers, including the Preston Chronicle, the Preston Herald and the Preston Guardian, becoming chief reporter on the latter. He also supplemented his income with freelance reporting for newspapers outside the town. Dismissed by the Guardian in 1867, apparently because its proprietor believed he intended to establish a rival news agency, he returned to the Chronicle. In March 1868, aged 31, he bought the paper for £580 and became its proprietor and editor. He developed the Chronicle into a successful business and ran it for 22 years, selling it in 1890. He subsequently launched a newspaper in Lancaster and in 1896 acquired the Wakefield Herald, which was managed by his son Ethelbert.

Alongside journalism, Hewitson was a prolific writer on Preston and its history. His books included Our Churches and Chapels (1869), Preston Town Council (1870), Our Country Churches and Chapels (1872), and his substantial History of Preston (1883), to which he appended a detailed chronology of the town from 705 to 1883. He also edited historical diaries, including that of Thomas Tyldesley, and in later life continued writing historical and antiquarian articles. Semi-retired after selling the Chronicle, he lived at various times in Preston, Morecambe and Yorkshire, while retaining interests in newspapers and property. He died in 1912, aged 75. Further information is available online at Open Book Publishers.

Hewitson began keeping diaries as a young man, with the surviving sequence extending from the 1860s almost to his death. Seventeen manuscript diaries are known, now held by Lancashire Archives, although there are substantial gaps. The fullest surviving run begins in 1865, when Hewitson was working as chief reporter on the Preston Guardian. He usually wrote at the end of the day, recording his reporting assignments, newspaper work, business dealings, reading, journeys and social encounters alongside domestic events and his reactions to the people and events around him. The diaries were also working records: Hewitson returned to them for information which could be reused in his journalism and historical writing. The result is an unusually detailed record not only of one Victorian family but of the everyday mechanics of provincial journalism - meetings and court cases, news gathering, gossip, freelance work, printing, editing and the commercial running of a newspaper. Diaries by nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare; Hobbs describes Hewitson’s as ‘the only known diaries of a 19th-century provincial journalist’.

The diaries have been transcribed and edited by journalism historian Andrew Hobbs, with work also undertaken by Hewitson’s descendant Margaret Dickinson, Pauline Wainwright and the Friends of Lancashire Archives. The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865-1887, edited by Hobbs, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2022 and made freely available online. It contains the surviving diaries for 1865-1868, 1872-1875, 1881, 1884-1885 and 1887, together with autobiographical material and extensive annotation. A second volume, covering the surviving diaries from 1891 to 1912, is in preparation. Transcriptions of much of this later material have meanwhile been made available online by Hobbs through his Hewitson Diaries website. The diaries provide a particularly rich source for the history of Victorian journalism, while also documenting family life, politics, religion, entertainment and the changing social and commercial life of Preston.

6 January 1873 

‘Heard this morning - first day of “Great Saturday Horse Fair” - that my friend Jas. Kenyon had rambled off somewhere in “the blues”. Went with a friend to police station & set on two detectives to search. Found out in evening, that Kenyon had rambled home into Claughton. At night I & wife went to a carding party at house of a person called R. Lancaster in Eastcliff rd. Had supper there, & stayed till 1 in morning.’

22 May 1873 

‘Working in shop nearly all day except a little in morning when I had a dip into John Stuart Mill’s work on Utilitarianism. About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover St[ree]t, & how he found out the “medium”, a late L[iver]pool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities. To-day young Woods tobacconist went into shop I left in Fishergate. My charge for fixtures is 5/- per week.’

3 February 1874

‘Preston election to-day. Voting began at 8 in morning & closed at 4 in af[ternoo]n. All mills closed from dinner time. Much crowding in Fishergate; but all orderly. The candidates were Mr E Hermon & Mr J Holker (the two previous Conservative members) & Mr Mottershead, who came down from London as a “Working Man’s candidate”. The result of the election was the return of Hermon & Holker. Mottershead polled more votes than was expected. At night after doing some telegraphing, I had something to drink with some Conservatives.’

20 February 1874

‘Violent railway collision this morning between Euxton & Coppull. Scotch limited mail, through a fog, ran into a standing coal train. Much damage & destruction; & driver & stoker of mail af[terwar]ds died through the injuries they received. I went to scene of accident at noon & got some particulars for our own & other papers. Telegraphed it to The Times. Disraeli’s new administration announced at 12.30 to-night.’

1 April 1874 

‘A tolerably easy day; & April joke making confined to children.’

13 August 1874

‘My 38th birthday. I thank God that I have lived thus far & have amid all changes & struggles enjoyed & felt His wisdom & goodness. May my next 38 years & odd be similarly - nay more fully - imbued with & blessed by His excellence. Working all day & home to White Horse at night.’

18 April 1875

‘To Morecambe with Florence my daughter this morning. Walked from Hest Bank to Morecambe along sands side. Beautiful walk - tide in, sea birds flying about. Spent a good part of day on pier where my father in law has a refreshment room.’

30 January 1884

‘My daughter Florence returned to daughter day from America in the SS “City of Chicago” - same boat she & I went out in. I went to L[iver]pool to meet her - sailed down Mersey in a tender as far as New Brighton. Daughter had a very rough voyage & was sick again. To Preston - home - both of us early.’

Tuesday 25 March 1884

‘To St Anne’s-on-Sea to day in order to get materials for an article on the place. Mr T Fair, who will pay me for the article, wants it for one of the Manchester evening papers. I called at his house and had lunch. Then I went with him in his carriage to St Anne’s round which I rode, & then he left me to my own wanderings & musings. Quiet but pleasant. Home at about 7 in evening.’

22 January 1885

‘Same. At night I & my wife went to Gaiety Theatre to see “the claimant” - the alleged Sir Roger Tichborne, who has recently been released on ticket of leave, after ab[ou]t 10 y[ea]rs imp[risonmen]t for perjury. Prior to his trial he paid a visit to Preston, & at a public gathering - anyhow audience - in the Corn Xchange - I put two or three questions to him. He answered them cunningly but badly. The chief questions were - Did he know anybody except himself who had forgotten t[he] name of his mother and the very alphabet o[f] a language he once was well acquainted with. He looked considerably thinner & was going quite grey in whiskers on Thursday night.’

5 February 1885

‘Unwell. Had a Turkish bath in af[ternoo]n - heat during part of time being 225 degrees. Working till 10.5 at night - on leaving the bath. News published of the fall of Khartoum this morning. Great shock to English.’

A very great curiosity

‘Rode from Mr. Lesly’s to view the Giant’s Causeway. It is certainly a very great curiosity, as an object for speculation, upon the manner of its formation; whether it owes its origin to fire, and is a species of lava, or to chrystalization, or to whatever cause, is a point that has employed the attention of men much more able to decide upon it than I am.’ This is Arthur Young - who went on to become an early contributor to agricultural economy - writing in his diary exactly 250 years ago today. 

Young was born in 1741 in Whitehall, London, the younger son of the Revd Arthur Young, rector of Bradfield Combust, Suffolk, and chaplain to Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons. His mother, Anna Lucretia de Coussmaker, came from a Huguenot family. Educated privately, Young received no formal university education but developed an early fascination with farming, estate management and economic improvement. After his father’s death he inherited a small Suffolk estate, where a succession of ambitious but often unsuccessful agricultural experiments convinced him that careful observation and the exchange of practical knowledge were more valuable than theory alone.

From the 1760s, Young established himself as Britain’s leading agricultural writer. He published influential works including A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England (1768), A Six Months Tour through the North of England (1770) and The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (1771), combining detailed observations on farming methods with comments on land ownership, rural society and local economies. In 1784 he founded the Annals of Agriculture, which rapidly became the principal periodical devoted to agricultural improvement in Britain. His reputation brought him into contact with many of the leading scientific, political and landed figures of the age, while his extensive travels made him one of the best-informed observers of the British countryside.

Young’s interests extended beyond agriculture to economics, politics and social reform. Between 1787 and 1789 he travelled widely in France, recording the conditions that immediately preceded the French Revolution in the celebrated Travels in France. In 1793 he was appointed secretary to the newly established Board of Agriculture, a post he held for the remainder of his working life and through which he helped promote agricultural innovation across Britain. Increasing blindness restricted his activities during his later years, but he continued writing and advising until his death in 1820. He was buried at Bradfield Combust in Suffolk. Wikipedia has further information.

Young’s importance as a diarist lies in the remarkable body of journals and notebooks that underpinned his published tours. Although written to support books rather than for private introspection, his daily records capture the rhythms of late eighteenth-century travel with unusual precision. They preserve conversations with farmers, landlords, labourers and politicians, together with observations on crops, livestock, roads, markets, industry, prices and social conditions. Their combination of factual detail and immediate impressions makes them indispensable primary sources for historians of agriculture, rural life and the wider economic history of Britain and Europe.

Young’s Irish journal occupies a distinctive place within this corpus. He toured Ireland between 1776 and 1779, travelling thousands of miles through every province to examine farming practices, land tenure, manufacturing and the condition of the rural population. His observations were published in 1780 as A Tour in Ireland, one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of eighteenth-century Ireland. The journal on which the work was based led to several new editions - including Arthur Young’s Tour of Ireland (George Bell & sons, 1892) which is freely available at Internet Archive - and to modern scholarly editions. Here is Young writing about his day exactly a quarter of a century ago

4 August 1776

‘Accompanied Mr. Lesly to his brother’s at ——, within 3 miles of the Giant’s Causeway, where I had the pleasure of learning several particulars concerning the country upon the coast. They measure by the Cunningham-acre, and rents are on an average 12s. Along the coast there is a tract of clay at from 14s. to 20s. The courses of crops; 1. Potatoes. 2. Barley. 3. Oats. 4. Oats. Potatoes. 2. Barley. 3. Flax. 4. Oats. 5. Oats, and then lay out for 2 years.

Much of the country is in the rundale and likewise in the change-dale system. The little farmers are all weavers, who weave 10 or 1200 linen, and spin great quantities of yarn for the Derry market. Oatmeal and potatoes are the general food of the lower people, who reckon that one barrel of potatoes, to live on, is equal to 2 bushels of meal. One barrel will last a family of six eight days, and costs on an average 3s. 6d. or 4s. Oatmeal 1s. 2d. to 3s. 6d. the 20 lb. but 1½d. per lb. on an average. One bushel of oats yields 18 lb. of meal. The oats are dried at home with turf on kilns, which cost from £3 to £5; they are then sent to a mill to be shelled, in which operation they lose half; after which they are ground; the landlord appoints the mill, and they pay 22d. for it.

The average crop of potatoes is 300 bushels on the Cunningham acre, which is 259 to the English. [. . .]

They are, however, sometimes so low that, instead of profit, the account is a losing one; last year they were 4d. a bushel, and in Coleraine 3d. Oats are now 1s. a bushel; several thousand bushels have been exported from Coleraine to London at that price.

There is a considerable salmon fishery on the coast; the fish are cured in puncheons with common salt, and then in tierces of 42 gallons each, 6 of which make a ton; and it sells at present at £17 a ton, but never before more than £16; average for 10 years £14. This rise of price is attributed to the American supply of the Mediterranean with fish being cut off.

Rode from Mr. Lesly’s to view the Giant’s Causeway. It is certainly a very great curiosity, as an object for speculation, upon the manner of its formation; whether it owes its origin to fire, and is a species of lava, or to chrystalization, or to whatever cause, is a point that has employed the attention of men much more able to decide upon it than I am; and has been so often treated, that nothing I could say could be new. When two bits of these basaltes are rubbed together quick, they emit a considerable scent like burnt leather. Neither the scenery of the Causeway, nor of the adjacent mountains, is very magnificent, though the cliffs are bold; but for a considerable distance there is a strong disposition in the rocks to run into pentagonal cylinders, and even at —— Bridge, by Mr. Lesly’s, is a rock in which the same disposition is plainly visible. I believe the Causeway would have struck me more if I had not seen the prints of Staffa. Returned to Lesly Hill

There the Right Hon. Mr. Jackson assisted me with the greatest politeness in procuring the intelligence I wished about the salmon fishery, which is the greatest in the kingdom; and viewed both fisheries above and below the town, very pleasantly situated on the river Ban. The salmon spawn in all the rivers that run into the Ban about the beginning of August and, as soon as they have done, swim to the sea, where they stay till January, when they begin to return to the fresh water, and continue doing it till August, in which voyage they are taken; the nets are set the middle of January, but by Act of Parliament no nets nor weirs can be kept down after the 12th of August. All the fisheries on the river Ban let at £6000 a year. From the sea to the rock above Coleraine, where the weirs are built, belongs to the London Companies; the greatest part of the rest to Lord Donnegal. The eel fisheries let at £1000 a year; and the salmon fisheries at Coleraine, £1000. The eels make periodical voyages, as the salmon, but instead of spawning in the fresh water, they go to the sea to spawn, and the young fry return against the stream; to enable them to do which with greater ease at the leap, straw ropes are hung in the water for them; when they return to sea, they are taken: many of them weigh 9 or 10 lb. The young salmon are called grawls, and grow at a rate which I should suppose scarce any fish commonly known equals; for within the year some of them will come to 16 and 18 lb. but in general 10 or 12 lb. such as escape the first year’s fishery are salmon; and at 2 years old will generally weigh 20 to 25 lb. This year’s fishery has proved the greatest that ever was known, and they had the largest hawl, taking 1452 salmon at one drag of one net. In the year 1758 they had 882, which was the next greatest hawl. I had the pleasure of seeing 370 drawn in at once. They have this year taken 400 ton of fish; 200 sold fresh at 1d. and 1½d. a lb. and 200 salted, at £18 and £20 per ton, which are sent to London, Spain, and Italy. The fishery employs 80 men, and the expences in general calculated to equal the rent.

The linen manufacture is very general about Coleraine, coarse ten hundred linen. It is carried to Dublin in cars 110 miles, at 5s. per cwt. in summer, and 7s. 6d. in winter. Rents in Derry 10s. 6d. the Irish acre; and farms from 6 to 15 acres. The emigrations from this neighbourhood were in general of idle, loose, disorderly people. It is at present, I was informed, too populous; and if the emigrations are not renewed, the ill effects will be severely felt. The whole county of Derry belongs to the London Companies and the Bishop, except some trifling properties. There is a little trade at Coleraine in hides, butter, and fish, and some meal is imported, which sounds strange after hearing that so many oats had been exported.

Mr. Jackson has made great improvements to his house, which is situated in a very pretty domain of 85 acres on the banks of the river, and all the timber he has used is out of his bog; he gets very large oak and fir trees: they are found 20 feet deep, and all lie exactly east and west.’