Sir Haggard’s diaries

Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the British author of many an adventure story set in colonial Africa, often in sympathy with the native populations, was born 170 years ago today. He may have kept a private diary when younger, but the only diary extracts to have been published - Private Diaries and Diary of an African Journey - date from the last decade of his life. In the latter book, Haggard records an interesting conversation with the wife of South Africa’s first Prime Minister about the country’s future.

Haggard was born into a large family, in Norfolk, England, on 22 June 1856. His father was a barrister and his mother a writer. He was schooled at Ipswich Grammar, and then in London to enter the Foreign Office, but he never sat the necessary exams. Instead, in 1875, his father sent him to South Africa to work for his friend, Sir Henry Bulwer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Natal. By 1878, he had secured himself a job as registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal. In 1880, he returned to England briefly, and there married Marianna Louisa Margitson with whom he had one son (who died young), and three daughters.

The family left South Africa in 1882, and settled in Ditchingham, Norfolk. Haggard turned to the law and was called to the bar in 1884, but, by then, he was more interested in writing novels. His most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, was published in 1885, and other stories based in Africa followed, most notably She, which has become, according to Wikipedia, one of the best-selling single-volume books of all time. Also according to Wikipedia, his novels portray many of the stereotypes associated with colonialism, ‘yet they are unusual for the degree of sympathy with which the native populations are portrayed.’

Although Haggard failed to get elected to Parliament in 1895, he became involved with reform in the agricultural sector, sitting on land use commissions, and occasionally travelling to the colonies. Apart from his many fiction works, he wrote several non-fiction books, including Rural England (1902) and an autobiography (The Days of My Life, 1926). He was knighted in 1912 and made a KBE in 1919. He died in 1925. Further biographical information about Haggard can be found at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Days of My Life is available at Internet Archive or at Project Gutenberg Australia.

From the start of the First World War (until his death), Haggard kept a detailed diary. This was edited by D. S. Higgins and published by Cassel in 1980 as The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, 1914-1925. According to Kirkus Reviews, the published extracts (only some two per cent of the total diaries) make for ‘a live and affecting document’; however the impression the journal leaves is of ‘a fragile, worn-out relic from a bygone era’. Morton N. Cohen, author of Haggard’s biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required) is less generous: ‘[The diary] is, sadly, the account of a sour old man who sees himself betrayed by fate, a disillusioned imperialist with authoritarian, racist leanings, who ranted against the Jews, communists, Bolsheviks, trade unionists, the Irish, and Indian nationalists (the editor of his diaries omits from the published text most of Haggard’s harangues).’

The full work can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive. Here are two extracts.

22 June 1921

‘By the lake side, Blagdon. Again my birthday. I am now 65! Alas how swiftly the years go by and I sink into old age. Disguise the truth as one will, it remains a melancholy truth that for me middle age has followed youth into the limbo of the past leaving at best but a few short years of life to be travelled before the last eclipse. Every year my friends grow fewer. Of the small number who still write to me upon my birthday my sister Ella was always one. And Ella has gone whither soon all of my generation must follow her.’

30 March 1917

‘I said to Kipling at the Athenaeum today that I trusted that we should not be expected to inhabit that region in the next world which was occupied by Germans. He replied that he was quite convinced that we should find none in any hell that he and I might land in. I think so too; whatever our sins we have not deserved that!

Rudyard Kipling and Martin Conway¹ were lunching together. Afterwards Conway came into the billiard room downstairs and informed me that Rudyard Kipling had been talking with admiration and amazement of the MS. of the story Yva, which I had given to him to read, saying that it was as full of go and imagination as though I had been sixteen instead of sixty.

Later Rudyard turned up and repeated this and more. He said to me that he had read the whole thing at a sitting ‘interlineations and all’, really read it, and that its grip and ‘freshness’ astonished him. He lay upon a sofa with those slippery sheets before him, unable to leave it, and thought it a remarkable work of imagination - really a new thing. I asked him if he had any criticisms to make. He said that he would not venture to offer any - there was the work - in a way outside of criticism - as good as anything I had ever done - or words to that effect. Evidently too, he meant all he said. This from such a man is complimentary, especially as he is not prodigal of compliments, but I am sure that when it appears the public - or rather the critics - will not discover these virtues in the book. It is not their fashion to praise my work. However, I am glad that the tale pleases its first reader so completely. The truth is that he (Kipling) has imagination, vision and can understand, amongst other things that Romance may be the vehicle of much that does not appear to the casual reader.’

Haggard also kept a diary earlier in his life, although how often is not clear. In 1899, Longmans, Green & Co published a farming diary for the year 1898, A Farmer’s Year (freely available at Internet Archive), and, in 1905, it published A Gardener’s Year (Internet Archive). Both books have diary-like entries, though they were written by Haggard as information books with publication in mind. In 2001, C. Hurst, by arrangement with the University of Natal Press, South Africa, published Diary of an African Journey (1914), as edited by Stephen Coan. Some pages of this can be viewed at Googlebooks (the source of the following extracts). Also, it’s worth noting that Haggard mentions - albeit only a couple of times - a diary in his autobiography.

7 March 1914
‘On this day, together with a number of other people, we were invited by the government to what might be termed a ‘joyride’ round Table Mountain. For one of our party, Mrs. Tatlow, it proved nothing of the sort. The motor she was in collided with another. She was thrown or fell out and has been left behind in bed at the Queen’s Hotel (I write this at Oudtshoorn) suffering from something like slight concussion. We lunched in a tent at the famous house of Groot Constantia. This place was granted in 1684 to Van der Stel, who was the next governor to Van Riebeeck. He built the house and began to cultivate the vines from which the well-known wine Constantia was made. Its last owners were the Cloetes who sold it in 1885 with 280 acres of land to the government for the small sum of £5 500. Since that time the state could have done well on their bargain if, as I was informed by the manager, they refused an offer for it of £28 000. Here there are 103 acres under vines and 56 under fruit trees. The house with its large cool rooms all adorned with ancient and appropriate furniture is really beautiful.

At luncheon which was given in a tent I sat next to, and had an interesting conversation with, Mrs. Botha, who expressed herself as very pleased that I agreed with her husband, the Prime Minister [Louis Botha], as to the uselessness of attempting to emigrate poor white folk to South Africa when already there were enough of them. Such people, unskilled and resourceless, she said, would come right up against the competition of the native, and their exclusion, which in some quarters was set down to race feeling, was really in their own interests. The only openings were for farmers with some capital, a scarce class. We discussed the outlook of the white inhabitants of South Africa in the future and both agreed that it seemed very doubtful - chiefly because of this native question. The native could no longer be suppressed, or even oppressed: he must follow his destiny and often he was an able and a competent person. In practice South Africa must face the fact that all it has to rely on, so far as the whites are concerned, is its present population and their progeny. But here came the trouble - the restriction of population (i.e. race suicide) is creeping in, even among the Boers, except quite in the backveld districts where it would reach ere long. One no longer saw the large families of 30 years ago: they grew smaller and smaller. Moreover those who were growing up, for some subtle reason, in enterprise, in virility and femininity in their widest sense, were not the men and women of the stamp of our generation. She had often said as much to her own children. What was to be the end of it? She could not tell but the future was dark and dubious. Perhaps at last South Africa would be the heritage of the black races with an admixture of white blood. The danger of war between whites and Bantu had gone by, but there were other dangers. Thus what I saw on the previous day, white man and black, working side by side was one of them: it meant the approach of equality. Once that was established how could the dwindling white people hold their own against an increasing race, already four or five times as numerous?

She said it was hard work for a man like her husband to be Prime Minister of the Union in these days and hard for his wife also. It was both exhausting and difficult to deal with politics continually and keep his hands quite clean. We both agreed that time and experience were wonderful softeners of strong views. Thus today I should not write another Jess and she would not think about the English as she had thought even a dozen years ago. She told me that although it seemed a strange thing for her to say, the deportation of the captured Boers had been a very good thing for the people. The sight of other lands had opened their minds and made them more progressive; also they had learnt what the British Empire meant. Such is a summary of this enlightening talk made from notes taken that evening, and I think one that is accurate, although compressed. Mrs. Botha struck me as an able woman in a quiet way and I liked her very much.’

10 March 1914
‘Woke up lo find that we were running over bush-clad sourveld with a few ostriches wandering round lonely Boer steadings. While I was dressing the iron lid of the washbasin fell on and crushed the top plate of the false teeth which were recently fitted with so much discomfort. A most annoying incident. Luckily I have the old temporary set with me which the dentist wanted to destroy.

At lunch time we came to a range of mountains called Outniqiua, or some such name, that tower above a little township of about 2 000 inhabitants, called George, which is largely inhabited by retired persons in search of quiet. The situation is fine on a flat plain dominated by tall grassy peaks down which run waterfalls that look like lines of wandering silver. At the beginning of the pass we went through government plantations of gums [eucalypts] of about 10 years of age which are doing splendidly. There are several of these here. Next we passed through some native bush in the kloofs, then came broom, heather and bracken, clothing the broad hill shoulders. From the crest of the pass the view was grand. The flat plain below diversified with plantations surrounding the scattered town of George and in the distance the great sea. All this district might be afforested, the hills with pines and the plains with gums. As the land seems to be worth no more than 10s. an acre it would be an excellent purpose to which to put it. About 4 o’clock we entered the Oudtshoorn valley, a hot and fertile place surrounded by hills, and everywhere saw ostriches feeding on lucerne in their wired camps.

On arrival we were met by the mayor and notables and taken off to see the farm of Mr. John le Roux where, after 34 years or so. I renewed my acquaintance with that ungainly but profitable fowl, the ostrich. By the way, at the station a gentleman whose name I think was Rex came up and asked me if I remembered him - as I did not he produced from his pocket an official order of the Pretoria High Court, written and signed by myself in 1878, appointing him a sworn interpreter. I wonder if he always carries it about with him. I was glad to see that the order was properly drawn and written in a better hand than I can boast nowadays. The signature, however, is identical with that I use at present.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 22 June 2016.

Drawing on the flat system

Almost 50 years after the death of the Scottish artist Duncan Grant, a previously unknown diary was discovered among family papers and later sold at auction. The diary/notebook, covering the whole of 1911, fetched £13,750 - more than seventeen times its estimate - and provides a rare first-hand record of the young artist’s life before he became one of the defining painters of the Bloomsbury Group.

Grant was born near Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands in 1885. The son of a British Army officer, he spent parts of his childhood in India and Burma before returning to England. After studying at Westminster School of Art he travelled in Europe, where he encountered the work of Cézanne, Matisse and other modern French artists whose influence would shape his own developing style. Prior to the First World War, he had become closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group. 

Grant formed friendships with Virginia Woolf (see One wave after another, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey (Strachey’s new biography), John Maynard Keynes and many other leading literary and artistic figures of the period. As well as painting, he designed textiles, stage sets, murals and decorative schemes, becoming one of the most versatile artists of his generation. He spent much of his adult life at Charleston in Sussex with Vanessa Bell, creating one of the most celebrated artistic households in Britain. Although fashions in art changed dramatically during his long career, he remained active well into old age and continued painting almost until the end of his life. He died in 1978. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the Tate and Charleston.

The newly discovered diary covers the year 1911, when Grant was twenty-six years old and beginning to establish himself professionally. It emerged from the papers of the family of art historian John Woodeson and appears to be the only diary of Grant’s currently known to survive. It was put up for auction by Gorringe’s (Lewes) in March 2025 with a high estimate of £800 - and sold for £11,000! According to newspaper reports at the time, it was bought by a private buyer - see Scottish Field.

Rather than a reflective journal, the diary is essentially a working notebook, recording appointments, journeys, paintings, meals, exhibitions and encounters with friends. The entries reveal a busy existence centred on art and friendship. Grant frequently notes meetings with Adrian Stephen, Henry Lamb and other members of his circle. He worked steadily throughout the year, recording progress on paintings and occasionally making brief observations about artistic technique. One entry describes work on a composition of dancers and notes that a ‘system of colour appears plain & simple’, adding the intriguing remark: ‘Drawing on the flat system.’ Elsewhere he records painting a child, sketching friends, travelling to Cambridge, dining at restaurants, attending exhibitions and taking Turkish baths.

The diary also captures Grant moving through the wider world beyond Bloomsbury. In June 1911 he recorded attending the Coronation procession of George V and Queen Mary, later remarking on the evening celebrations and noting that ‘the illuminations were fine’. Other entries describe continental travel, including visits to Segesta, Palermo and Monreale in Sicily. The notebook even contains a pencil sketch of a standing nude, reinforcing its character as a working artist’s personal record rather than a conventional diary.

The following extracts from the notebook have been (amateurishly) transcribed from the images made available by Gorringe’s at the time of the auction.  

21 January 1911

‘My 26th birthday. Mother gave me this book as a present, also a cushion & a sponge. Aunt [?] 10/-. Adrian 2 photos. At studio by 10. Visit from Adrian. Painted dancing women. Lunch at 29. Again painted dancing women. Tea at ABC. Adrian. (Peacock. Melincourt). Home to dinner. Aunt returned from Switzerland. Daddy to dinner.’

23 January 1911

‘Dark day. Up late. 11. Painted dancers after lunch the red figure. System of colour appears plain & simple. Drawing on the flat system.’

24 January 1911

‘Bright day. Adrian to breakfast. He afterwards to Cambridge. Painted child. Lunch ABC with Henry Lamb all afternoon. Tea ABC. A back [too]. Drew him. Dinner at 29.’

22 June 1911

‘Full breakfast at 6. I visited the Coronation Procession. Took a position in Trafalgar Sq. I then walked up [the Haymarket?] & from Jermyn Street to St James’s Sq. Had a T. Bath at 8 [?] at about 12:30 & saw the procession from Pall Mall [. . .] Fitzroy Sq.’

Fire in the music

Joseph Martin Kraus, a German-born composer who found fame in, and thanks to, the Swedish court of King Gustav III, was born 270 years ago today. He was sent by Gustav on a grand tour of Europe, and for a few months kept a rather haphazard diary of his travels, meetings and concert visits, often providing detailed and opinionated critiques of the latter.

Kraus was born in the central German town of Miltenberg in Franconia on 20 June 1756, though the family moved to Buchen in Baden-Württemberg in 1761. He began to show musical talent at an early age, and was taught piano and violin. Though pressed to study law at the University of Mainz, he moved to University of Erfurt where he focused more on music. He was obliged to remain for a year at home while his father underwent prosecution for misuse of office, but during this period he wrote Tolon, a drama in three acts, and several musical works for the local church. In 1776 he returned to study, this time at the University of Göttingen, where he came into contact with members of the Romantic literary movement, Sturm und Drang.

A fellow student at Göttingen persuaded Kraus, in 1778, to move to Stockholm where King Gustav III was well known as a patron of the arts. However, there were hard times for Kraus, and it took him three years before winning favour from the king, and being asked to write music for his opera libretto Proserpina. Following a successful premier, he was appointed vice-Kapellmeister of the Royal Swedish Opera and director of the Royal Academy of Music. Subsequently, Gustav paid for Kraus to go on a grand tour of Europe, one lasting over four years, and during which he met many leading musical figures of the day - not least Gluck, Salieri and Haydn.

During his travels, Kraus composed many works, including symphonies sometimes later attributed to others, and his flute quintet in D Major. On his return to Sweden, in 1787, he was appointed as director of curriculum at the Royal Academy of Music, and the next year he succeeded as Kapellmeister. Although he seems to have favoured instrumental music, the demands of Gustav’s court were for operas, arias and the like. In 1792, he was present at a masked ball when Gustav was assassinated. His death left the arts that he had nurtured in distress. Kraus wrote Funeral Cantata and the Symphonie funèbre, which were played at the burial ceremony. Klaus died of TB a few months later. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Artaria, and RISM.

During the early months of his grand tour, from October 1782 into 1783, Kraus kept a rather haphazard diary -  the contents alternate between painstaking detail and superficial description, and switch from imperfect Swedish to German here and there. The extant manuscript, held by Universitets-bibliotek in Uppsala, Sweden, consists of no more than 11 leaves written on both sides. According to Bertil van Boer, who wrote an essay on the diary for The Journal of Musicology in 1990, the main text ‘is a combination of travel/route description, drafts of letters, opinionated critiques of musical instruments, literary and musical works, and concerts, and descriptions of people he met during his journey.’ The essay, titled The Travel Diary of Joseph Martin Kraus, is available online at JSTOR with log-in.

In introducing Kraus’s diary, van Boer refers to the growing tradition among young people to be sent on a Grand Tour as part of their education. Specifically, though, in the music world, he refers to the diaries of Charles Burney which not only give a detailed picture of music in the Europe during the middle part of the eighteenth century, but were used as a substantial foundation for his history of music - see The wonderful echo for more. He goes on to examine and analyse Kraus’s diary in some detail - calling it ‘a hodgepodge’, and noting, for example, that Kraus only mentions three of his own musical compositions. Van Boer provides a few quotes from the diary, translated into English, including the following.

6 April 1783
‘The sixth was an academy for the benefit of a newly-established musical society; Die Israeliten in der Wilste composed by Max. Ulbikh was performed. The orchestra was strong but did not contain the promised list of 180 members, but rather only some 70-odd people. In general, the music contained much fire. The overture in D Minor had three movements; the first expressed the uproar of the people quite well. The second, in A Major, and the last, in D Major, didn’t belong at all. He [Ulbrich] proceeds into the first chorus with an idea [taken) from the first movement. [Carl Philipp Emanuel] Bach has understood the same meaning in this chorus better, I believe. The role of the First Israelite was sung by Fraulein Theresia Tauber. The aria “Will er” was too modern, the performance of the singer very poor, and her inability was even more apparent in the cadenza in the last line (“Ach, wie seyd ihr so begluckt [Begluckt seid ihr, ach]”). The Aaron was Hoffman, a wretched bass. His aria was also too modern, and in both of these arias the main problem was that the accompaniment was too strong. The same can be said for the third aria sung by Signorina Cavalieri; it was too soloistic, and the concertante complement to the voice in the English horn was not terribly successful in terms of expression.

The chorus of Israelites (“Du hist der Ursprung,” etc.), however, was far above the former and Bach’s entire work, insofar as the arias and choruses contain fire. The movement is in C Minor and a fugue. With a very well-done contrast. Father Moses interrupt the chorus with his remarks, and the answer of the people to Moses’s question - Hast du die Werke voll Wunder schon vergessen, die fur dich dein Gott getan?” - cannot bought be thought more appropriate: “Gott schlummerte” (Ungrateful people! So do you!). The composer has altered the words according to the circumstances [in general]; in this chorus as well, but with sinfully exposed gaps. The aria of Moses immediately following, however, is too trivial. The duet of both Israelites could, in another meter, be appropriate for any [secular] concert. I should mention in this regard that both singers competed quite prettily with each other as to who could be the most raging. The recitative of Moses mixed with the chorus that follows is pretty but [contains] nothing new. Moreover, the first movement of Moses’s prayer, in which the guilt and the nature of the piece certainly demands heightened tension, is fiat. The fully-worked-out chorus in C Major is well-conceived, and the [word]-painting of the women slaves is shown altogether enchantingly. This concludes the first act.

The same comments are valid for the second act, though the music is much less worthy of a church. The theme of the first recitative is too childish for the subject and characters; the chorus which begins with a solo by M[oses] ditto, the aria of the first Israelite in G Major ditto, and the unusually trivial aria of Moses with an obbligato violoncello ditto. In the second half (“Dies ist der Helden”) the accompaniment is so strong that one cannot hear the voices. In the recitative which precedes the aria, the composer paints [the words] “Doch einst vor meinem Blicken, seh’ ich die Zukunft aufgehellt” with a rising crescendo in the timpani, adding one wind instrument after another on top. The recitative ends in the same fashion but with less effect. The following aria for Signorina Cavaliert is [set] for obbligato oboe, flute, bassoon, horns and a blend of onions and garlic. The last chorus is mediocre. In general, the first half [of oratorio] far outshines the second. The fault [for this] lies partially with the text. In the last part, the composer has thoughts here and there that were heard in the first.

The execution was quite good - but not exact in piano [passages]. I did not observe many of the lesser crescendos [i.e. dynamics], and each of the desks of violins had its own bowings. The bass line was also not clear owing to the softness of the contrabasses and the lack of violoncellos. The composer has also overworked the [vocal] basses too much.

Between the two acts [I] heard the emperor’s wind band consisting of a oboes, 2 clarinets. 2 horns, [and] 2 bassoons. The composition by Johann Went was very well set for the nature of the instruments but nothing new for the mind. The execution was as admirable as could be desired. . .’

8 April 1783
‘The eighth was the same academy [as the sixth]. All of my earlier comments also apply here. Instead of the previous musical interlude (i.e., the HarmoniemusikJ, I heard Herr (Ludwig) Gehring on the flute. The tuning of his instrument was a half-step sharp, and I didn’t think that the year he was gone from Gottingen had done him as much good as it could have. The piece by [Friedrich] Graf was wonderful, as usual (p. 6r-7r].’

14 April 1783
‘The fourteenth I finally visited Gluck. He was quite polite, but told me personally that it was difficult to express himself now after his illness. His right hand also did not have its former perfect flexibility. Klopstock’s Hermannsschlacht is not yet written out, especially since, according to him, the Emperor was plaguing him about Les Daniades at the same time. At first, he wanted to use Salieri to write down [the latter] on paper for him - but he noted that it would be too much trouble, and on the orders of his doctor, he let it be. Salieri is allowed to set the opera in Paris under his own name. Cluck very clearly let it become known that Salieri has quite retained his thoughts, furthermore that he was not in favor of putting the opera on under his own name. He gave me his portrait and showed me the original painting which is a masterpiece of expression. He often repeated his contention that a simple song belonged of necessity to a stage piece. He was the first to make actors of the chorus in Paris, for previously they only stood there like statues. He allowed Orphée to be translated, but he was not satisfied with the first poet. He then accepted a mediocre one who did things more in accordance with his wishes. He is very satisfied with the scenes in Armide: “Un seul guerrier” [and] “Poursuivons notre ennemi jusqu’au trépasse,” etc. . .’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 20 June 2016.

An instant of an apoplexy

‘Nanny, our servant, died in an instant of an apoplexy. Lord, make it useful to the young people in our family, and may we all improve by the warning.’ This entry was written by Martha Laurens Ramsay, a rich Southerner who died 215 years ago today. Her published journals would later provide a rich account of family life in South Carolina during the early years of the United States.

Martha Laurens was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, the eldest daughter of Henry Laurens, one of colonial America's most prominent merchants and statesmen, and his wife Eleanor Ball Laurens. Her childhood was shaped by both privilege and upheaval. Following her mother's death when Martha was thirteen, much of her education fell to relatives and private tutors. During her youth she spent periods in England and France while her father pursued business and diplomatic responsibilities, experiences that broadened her outlook and exposed her to a wider world than most American women of her generation encountered.

The American Revolution transformed the Laurens family's fortunes and circumstances. Henry Laurens became President of the Continental Congress and later served as a diplomat for the new United States, while enduring imprisonment in the Tower of London after being captured at sea by the British. Throughout these turbulent years Martha developed the habits of religious self-examination and disciplined reflection. Deeply influenced by Presbyterian evangelicalism, she cultivated a faith that shaped every aspect of her private and family life.

In 1786 she married Dr David Ramsay, a physician, politician and historian who had served as a surgeon during the Revolutionary War and would become one of the earliest historians of the United States. The couple settled in Charleston and eventually had eleven children, though several died in infancy or childhood. Ramsay declared insolvency in the late 1790s, and was sued by Martha's brother in bankruptcy proceedings. As Ramsay’s wife, Martha experienced financial hardship, often feeling her faith was being tested. She took it upon herself to take responsibility for the ‘kins-keeping’ of the Laurens family; she and her husband adopted her niece Frances Eleanor Laurens, the daughter of her late brother John Laurens. Martha died on 10 June 1811, still only in her early 50s. Further information is available at Wikipedia.

Alongside the demands of motherhood and household management, Martha maintained journals and correspondence. These survive because her husband drew heavily upon them when compiling Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay, published in two volumes in 1812, a year after her death. The work - freely available at Internet Archive - combines extracts from journals, letters and family recollections to present a portrait of her character and religious life. Although never intended for publication, the diary passages preserve a distinctive female voice from the early United States. Historians have since valued them as an important record of domestic life, evangelical belief and family relationships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

16 July 1791

‘My feet had well nigh slipped, through the prevalence of my easily besetting sin; nevertheless, I laid me down to sleep, rejoicing that I had not utterly fallen. Lord, make me at all times watchful.’

17 July 1791

‘Lord, may this be a sanctified sabbath; a day to be remembered for holy resolutions and enabling grace. I am weak; O when shall the time of full strength come. In all the great trials and lesser vexations of life, may patience have its perfect work, till I lie down where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’

19 July 1791

‘I thank God for the ease and cheerfulness of this day; and that, in spite of secret griefs, and spiritual conflicts, my soul and body do both sweetly repose themselves in the God of my salvation.’

21 July 1791

‘Nanny, our servant, died in an instant of an apoplexy. Lord, make it useful to the young people in our family, and may we all improve by the warning.’

25 November 1791

‘My husband set out for Columbia. I pray God bless and preserve him; the same day, my dear little Patty fell into the parlour fire; but by God's good providence I was enabled to snatch her out, and smother the flame, before she had received any considerable injury; may God's goodness deeply affect me; and may I show forth his praise in a holy life. Lord, pluck her as a brand from everlasting burnings, and make her thine own child.’

6 October 1794

‘My sister Pinckney died, having been generally delirious from Friday; and her speech so thickened, that though she attempted it in the intervals of reason, she never could make us understand what she wished to say to us. Miss Futerell and myself were constantly with her; but my heart is too full to write on this subject. Lord, thou knowest my groanings, and my sighings are not hid from thee; commiserate thy poor, sinful, suffering creature; and fill me with humility and resignation, under this exceedingly heavy stroke of thy Providence.’

23 August 1796

‘Eleanor and myself taken with the fever. I had it moderately, but our dear Eleanor was like to die; she was brought low, indeed, and our hearts were filled with anguish on her account; but it pleased God to give efficacy to the means used for her recovery; a fourth bleeding, more copious than three preceding ones, seemed to relieve some of the most distressing and alarming symptoms she laboured under. I did not hide her danger from her, and have since repeatedly urged to her the propriety of devoting to God the life which he redeemed from the grave.’

2 June 1808

‘My dear husband, who is certainly a true believer, and a great noter of Providence, having received two dollars from a casual patient, said to me, “Here are two dollars which I have just got by chance.” I said, thank ye; but don't, at this time, when we are in such want of money, say that any comes by chance. He smiled with his usual kindness, and said, I only meant that I got it from a passing and not a stated patient... About two hours after he sent me up twenty dollars, just after I had been earnestly praying that the Lord from the storehouses of his mercy, would send some supply to my necessities and those of my family.’

Sand's Journal Intime

George Sand, the famous French writer, cigar smoker and lover of artists, died 140 years ago today. A hard working and prolific author of novels, she also wrote plays and an autobiography. Her commitment to the diary form was, however, intermittent. Nevertheless a collection of her personal writings, under the title Intimate Journal - taken from the French Journal Intime - were published in English in 1929, and have been reprinted several times since then.

Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin was born in 1804, in Paris, and educated at Nohant, her grandmother’s estate, and at a convent in Paris. In 1821, she inherited Nohant, and a year later married Casimir Dudevant. In 1831, though, she left Nohant and her husband and went, with two children, to Paris. The same year she published a first novel, Rose Et Blanche, written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, from whom she took her early pen-name (Jules Sand), and articles in Le Figaro. Her second novel Indiana, in 1832, written under the pen-name George Sand, brought her near instant fame. It told of a naive woman abused by an older husband and deceived by a selfish seducer.

Thereafter, Sand became a celebrity of sorts, famously dressing in men’s clothes much of the time, and having many love affairs, the most famous of which was with the composer Chopin. Her novels, and there were many, were largely romantic, with the heroes often workmen or peasants, living in the countryside of her childhood near Nohant. They were also often autobiographical, coloured by whoever she was involved with at the time, and overtly romantic with love usually conquering obstacles of class and convention.

Sand’s later years were lived at Nohant, comfortably in a relatively stable relationship with a younger artist, Alexandre Manceau, though he died in 1865, ten years before she herself died on 8 June 1876. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, Notable Biographies and NNDB. There are also a couple of biographical works freely available online: George Sand - Some aspects of her life and writings by Rene Doumic and translated into English by Alys Hallard in 1910 (Internet Archive or Full Books); and George Sand by E. Caro in 1888 (Internet Archive).

Sand was not a committed diarist though she did leave behind some diary writing in the form of letters addressed to lovers and occasional musings on her intimate relations and on her own shortcomings. These were collected together and first published but Williams & Norgate in an English translation in 1929 as The Intimate Journal of George Sand (edited and translated by Marie Jenney Howe). It has been reissued several times since then - see Googlebooks for a 1977 version by Cassandra Editions, or Chicago Press Review for a 2000 edition.

There are also the diaries - not translated into English as far as I know - that were kept by Manceau. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, author of The Last Love of George Sand: A Literary Biography (translated by Allison Charente, Arcade Publishing, 2013) explains: ‘George Sand had kept a periodic journal during key moments of her life, more to organise her thoughts than to keep a precise record of her days. She lived too much in the present to feel the need. Alexandre [Manceau] decided to record his lady’s activities, meetings, readings, works, and promenades every day, until his death. At first the Diaries were written in the first person, as if Sand was dictating them, but they morphed into the third person after a few weeks. Marceau would also make personal notes throughout the entries, creating an entirely separate character. The Diaries were his own work, even if George added her own details from time to time or occasionally took up the pen in his place.’

The following extracts are taken from the original 1929 edition of The Intimate Journal of George Sand.

1 June 1837

‘I awakened feeling dull. Piffoël’s sleep was disturbed by elusive desires that floated in a pale mist of dreams. The weather is neither cheerful nor depressing. It makes me restless. The trees are tossed by gusty, fantastic wind. The sun is hidden. If I put on my dressing-gown I am too hot, if I take it off I am cold. Leaden day in which I shall accomplish nothing worth while. Tired and apathetic brain! I have been drinking tea in the hope that it would carry this mood to a climax and so put an end to it.

No letter from Everard to-day. He is angry again. Happy man, to find anything worth getting angry about!

Before going to bed. From midnight until one o’clock I explained to Duteil the theory of dissatisfaction with life. I was indignant because he tried to make me believe he is happy every day and almost every hour of the day. Isn’t it exasperating to be treated as a fool by people who do not suffer?’

2 June 1837

‘Late at night. Piffoël walked twelve miles to-day. As soon as life becomes bearable we stop analyzing it. A tranquil day is spoiled by being examined. Shall we always be guided by feeling which distorts our ideas and impressions? Excessive emotion is like cross-eyed vision whose errors our reason tries feebly to correct.’

12 June 1837

‘This evening, while Franz was playing fantastic melodies of Schubert, the Princess walked in the shadows that fall across the terrace. She was wearing a dress of indefinite color. Her head and tall, slender body were swathed in a long white veil. As I watched her move back and forth with a light tread which scarcely touched the ground, the circle she described was cut across by rays from my lamp around which all the moths of the garden were dancing a delirious sarabande. The moon behind the lindens threw into high relief black specters of pine trees that stood immobile in the blue-gray air.

Over the flowers and plants a profound calm reigned. At the first harmonies from the divine instrument the breeze languished, then, falling exhausted on the tall grasses, slowly died. A nightingale had drawn near in the shadows of the foliage and, like the excellent musician he is, had caught the measure and tuned his own ecstatic throat in harmony with the music. He sang on, but as though he had become conscious of rivalry his voice became timid and withdrawn.

We were seated on the steps, listening to strains of the Erlkoenig. As the prelude gave place to the heartbreaking refrain, we sank into the mood of surrounding nature and were engulfed in melancholy enjoyment. And we could not take our fascinated gaze from the magic circle traced before our eyes by the mute sibyl in white. When the music, in a series of sad modulations, merged into tender melody, her steps grew slower.

From that time onward her pace kept the rhythm of the andante and the maestoso, and her movements showed such marvelous harmony that it was as if the music flowed from her as from a living lyre. Slowly she crossed the lamp-lit space, her white veil forming delicate, distinct contours on the dark background of the picture, while the rest of her was obliterated as it floated into the mystery of night. After a moment she drew near out of the dusk, as if she meant to alight on the white lilac. But, fugitive as the shadows, she slowly disappeared. She did not seem to withdraw under the dark foliage, it was rather as though darkness laid hold of her and drew her into its depths by thickening the curtain of shadows. At the end of the terrace she was completely lost in the pines, to reappear suddenly in the rays of the lamp like some spontaneous creation of its flame. Again she withdrew and floated, vaporous and pale, against the light. Finally she became visible and seated herself on a pliant branch, which supported her weight as though she had been a phantom. Then, as if bound by some mysterious tie to this pale, beautiful woman, the music stopped.

Rising, she glided by an inscrutable mounting movement toward the top of the steps and disappeared into the shadowy hall. A moment later we saw a veritable châtelaine of the middle ages cross the adjoining hall under the light of the candles. Her blond head shone like an aureole, and her veil, thrown over her shoulders, followed cloudlike the light and rapid motion of her flying figure.

The fingers straying across the piano were silent. The lights went out. The vision receded into the night.’

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

Thoughts, epiphanies, poems

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg, one of the most prominent members of the so-called Beat Generation, which also included Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Unlike Kerouac, whose diaries were not published until long after his death - see The rush of what is said - Ginsberg published several volumes of journals during his lifetime. Ginsberg himself, however, described them as ‘thoughts, epiphanies, vivid moments of haiku, poems, but not a continuous diary of conversations like Virginia Woolf, or Anais Nin, or Boswell.’

Ginsberg was born on 3 June 1926 into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, though he grew up in Paterson, 15 miles further north. His father was a published poet and teacher, and his mother a communist and unstable depressive. He attended Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Paterson. There he met William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, all later to be pivotal figures of the beat movement. Their behaviour was generally considered wayward, not least because of dabbling with drugs. By 1948, his last year at Columbia, Ginsberg had decided to become a poet, supposedly thanks to hearing the voice of William Blake in a vision. The following year, he spent several months in a mental institution as a consequence of pleading insanity when stolen goods were discovered in his dorm.

In late 1953, Ginsberg travelled to Mexico, and then settled in San Francisco. He fell in love with Peter Orlovsky, also a poet, who would subseqently remain his lifelong partner. In 1955, inspired by a poem by Kerouac, he wrote the long poem Howl which he performed at a reading he organised - Six Poets at the Six Gallery (known now as the Six Gallery reading). The poem, full of raw language and acceptance of his own homosexuality, would bring him world attention, not least because it was the subject of a failed obscenity charge. During the trial, Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved to Paris, living off the royalties from Howl and a disability pension that Orlovsky collected as a Korean veteran. For a period, they went to Tangier to stay with Burroughs who was working on, what would become, Naked Lunch.

In 1958, Ginsberg returned to New York City, troubled by his mother’s death two years earlier in an asylum. There he wrote what is considered his best work - Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg, an elegy for his mother based on a traditional Hebrew prayer for the deceased. Thereafter, he continued experimenting with drugs, and travelling widely, most significantly in India where he sought out holy men, remaining for the best part of two years. Having turned to Buddhism, he wrote, in Japan, The Change, about how meditation rather than drugs would help him towards enlightenment. Back in New York City, he befriended A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, helping him with money, organisation and contacts. By this time, he was also incorporating chanting and music (he had acquired a harmonium in India) into his poetry readings.

In the mid-1960s, Ginsberg became strongly associated with the hippy and antiwar movements, and is credited with creating the idea of ‘flower power’, using positive values, peace and love, in demonstrations. He was constantly at odds with the establishment. In 1965. he was asked to leave Cuba and Czechoslovakia by their respective governments. At home he was arrested at various demonstrations, and, in 1972, was jailed in Miami for protesting against President Richard Nixon. A few years later, he was arrested with Orlovsky for sitting on train tracks to try and stop a train loaded with radioactive waste.

In his later years, Ginsberg was a public figure, the archetypal Beat Generation writer. Despite increasing health problems, he continued to publish steadily and travel often, giving readings across the globe. He died in 1997 - for more biographical info see Wikipedia, Allen Ginsberg Project, Poetry Foundation, American National Biography Online, or various obituaries (New York Times, for example, or The Independent).

Ginsberg began using notebooks in childhood, collecting source material for poetry and prose, and for drafting poems. Anansi, in Toronto, published a first selection of extracts in 1968, 35 pages worth, under the title Airplane Dreams: Compositions from Journals (described as ‘not exactly poems, nor not poems’.)  This can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive.

Two years later, David Halewood Books and City Lights Books jointly published Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (describing, in prose and verse, his drug-induced experiences in the sub-continent). Grove Press brought out, in 1977, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, as edited by Gordon Ball. And nearly 20 years later, but still with input from Ginsberg himself, HarperCollins issued Journals: Mid-Fifties, also edited by Gordon Ball (1995).

According to Ball’s introduction, the printed text of the last book of journals draws on material entered by Ginsberg in twelve notebooks (and related separated pages) from June 1954 through mid-July 1958. Though presented as a single entity, he says, the editing has involved considerable interleaving between one journal and another, and sometimes yet a third; and both Ginsberg and Gordon Ball ‘lightly pruned and shaped’ the text.

The book also contains a few pages dictated by Ginsberg in 1984 (many journal notes were similarly dictated) which have been presented under the title: ‘Meditations on Record Keeping by Poet’. In these meditations, he describes how he was aware of a ‘historical change of consciousness and some kind of cultural revolution’, and how there was a contest between further liberation or 1984 authoritarianism. He felt he needed to record this in some way, and mentions some of society’s troubles (censorship, drugs, a growing military budget). He then says: ‘I saw all that at stake and thought best to keep a record: in my own writing but also just sort of an archive. So after I milked the notebooks for poems, I just kept hold of the notebooks for whatever I had in it, though I didn’t keep like a historical record of conversations - that wasn’t my function; I thought Kerouac had done that, historical record of scenes, conversations, characters, and persons. He had covered that and I couldn’t possibly compete with him; the best I thought I could do was just keep a record of my own changes of self-nature and perceptions - you know, intermittent perceptions, spots of time. So my notebook is thoughts, epiphanies, vivid moments of haiku, poems, but not a continuous diary of conversations like Virginia Woolf, or Anais Nin, or Boswell.’

Here are samples from two dated extracts in Journals: Mid-Fifties (though the vast majority of entries are undated, and many are poetry rather than prose).

31 March 1955
‘Tiring of the Journal - no writing in it - promotes slop - an egocentric method.

Life’s quiet finally, no love, another plane, after-hours from the office, struggle completed (high tonite on terpinhydrate of codeine), music, rugs, a lousy room and evening robes in which to read, a typewriter.

Lately in revising I’ve noticed a tendency - revising year pile of notes - to adjust the notes to small groups of lines as in 3-line stanza, begun however before reading the Williams late forms - the division being by active words, number of active words in phrase.

“the sad heart of August dies”

the nouns & verbs have a single weight, the adjectives usually less unless strong words or long ones. Count mainly by eye. But requirement of regularity of some lines is a clarity I find apparent lately, so that the notes don’t present themselves totally amorphous. The lines are not yet free enough - for this reason the concentration process is useful again in order to get a sense of measuring small lines - with later possibility, the expansion to a large form with lines distributed over the page

but equal, each parallel indentation equal or equivalent

So that the structure has a structure at least as an excuse for its form

following, as we might guess, the given possibilities of lengths of speech mind-think lines - there will probably be a select number to recognise & distinguish, the double:

and the triplet
“fantastical physical
images
Neal’s naked breast” ’


21 December 1956
‘Strange faces in the subway - the minute I sat down I realized I had power to see them straight in the eye and dig the eternal moment’s mask - as they ride by dreaming rocked in the dark with neon on their faces.

The 59th St. stop - recollecting Burroughs and Lucien, Columbus Circle, IRT Station, the dark pavement and endless outpouring of students and ballet dancers and musicians and fairies on this platform, waiting in their youth for life to begin - while I come back here dead (for the fourth time), disconnected. The new IRT B’way train - brighter and shinier - futuristic 1930s air conditioning aluminum big flowers growing out of the roof - parkay tile floors, glassy lights, shining steel poles to hold on to, even the people seem cleaner and richer - and the seats so nice and soft, red cushions.

A man with a notebook in front of me making notes for an ad. My own rusty (gaudy) book.

Beside me a fat well-dressed little kid bow tie, bright Jewish eyes, ass-length salt and pepper jacket - he don’t work on nothing, just lies in bed and eats ham in the morning. And gets up to ride the subway showing off all afternoon, at nite he goes back to supper and eats huge pork chops with lots of greasy potatoes and peas.

Approaching 116 St. Columbia Stop.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 3 June 2016.

Pioneer of amateur radio

Born 140 years ago today, Eugen Gerald Marcuse was one of the early experimenters with amateur radio. Long before the BBC launched its Empire Service, Marcuse was experimenting with short-wave broadcasts, transmitting speech and music to listeners across the British Empire and beyond. Although Marcuse is remembered today as a radio pioneer rather than a diarist, a single youthful journal of his from 1903 has survived and is catalogued at the British Library.

Marcuse was born in Sutton, Surrey, on 4 June 1886, one of three children. After attending local schools he entered the Crystal Palace School of Engineering in 1903 before serving an apprenticeship with Ruston and Proctor of Lincoln, manufacturers of steam engines, road rollers and tractors. His work took him abroad and, while still a young man, he developed an interest in the emerging technology of wireless communication. By 1913 he had obtained an experimental wireless licence and was conducting his own transmissions using equipment assembled from commercially available parts.

Following the First World War, Marcuse resumed his radio activities and soon became a leading figure in British amateur radio. Operating under the call sign 2NM and later G2NM, he participated in the pioneering transatlantic tests of the early 1920s and became one of the first British amateurs to establish two-way communication across the Atlantic. In 1925 he played a role in the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union and was elected one of its vice-presidents. He also relayed messages from the Hamilton Rice expedition in the Brazilian interior, earning recognition from the Royal Geographical Society.

The achievement for which he is best remembered came in 1927 when he began transmitting programmes of speech and music across the Empire using short-wave radio. These experimental broadcasts reached listeners throughout the world and anticipated by several years the BBC’s own Empire Service. Marcuse continued his radio work from Sonning-on-Thames and later Bosham, Sussex. During the Second World War he assisted the Radio Security Service, helping organise amateur volunteers who monitored radio transmissions on behalf of the authorities. He remained active in amateur radio throughout his life and died on 6 October 1961. Further information is most readily available from a pdf document available at the RADARC website.

Although Marcuse could not have claimed to be a diarist, there is a single surviving youthful journal from 1903 written during his studies at the Mechanical Engineering School, Einbeck, Germany. The 56-page volume - The Diary of Gerald Marcuse - was translated and edited by David Fry (a radio operator) according to the British Library, and published in the UK in 2022. However, there appears to be no trace online of its contents. Similarly, there’s an absence of information about a second David Fry book on Marcuse: in 2023, he seems to have published a fuller biography: Gerald Eugen Marcuse, G2NM: Pioneer of Radio.

The absence of accessible diary entries means that Marcuse’s own voice survives more readily through a taped interview recorded in the RADARC document, a year before his death. Looking back on his pioneering broadcasts, he recalled: ‘Everybody clamoured for Big Ben and nobody would give me a recording. I had to wait until 12.00 - it was the only time in those days they did it.’ Elsewhere he cheerfully admitted to ignoring official restrictions: ‘Your licence permitted you to rebroadcast? It didn’t, but I did not care in those days.’ 

Perhaps the most charming anecdote concerned the origins of his Empire broadcasts. Marcuse remembered receiving a letter from a listener in Bermuda who wrote: ‘I am enchanted with your voice which I hear every Sunday morning and I have three lovely daughters and a flourishing business. If you would like to come over you can have the pick of the daughters and the business.’