The Orphan Diaries

Just as Kate Summerscale and I were putting our coats on and getting ready to leave, she looked suddenly moved: ‘I like the idea of these diaries being ‘unwanted’, it makes them sound like orphans’. The comparison of diaries to helpless infants is also suggested in Summerscale’s new book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, the true story of a high-profile Victorian divorce trial where the main evidence and witness used by the prosecution was a stolen diary. Like the heroines of romantic Gothic novels of the time, Isabella Robinson used her diary as a means of confiding the details of her melodramatic love life and adultery with a married man. Summerscale reveals the sanctity of the diary; the idea of destroying such an intimate object: ‘would feel something like dropping a child into this wild and wandering grave’.

The scene that originally drew Summerscale to this story was the moment in which Isabella’s diary was seized by her husband, as she lay in bed delirious with fever, tossing and turning, muttering the names of other men. Prowling around this flickering candlelit sickly room, Henry Robinson’s suspicions were roused and he began rummaging through her writing desk, where he discovered the diary. Summerscale’s imagination was ignited by this image of the book being ‘lifted’ from the desk, like an infant from its cot, a living creature untapped of its stories and secrets.

The diary was ‘beguiling’ to Summerscale as a source that hovers on the ‘edge of fact and fiction…distorting and engaging… a reflection of social confusion’. Summerscale’s own work treads this fine line between reality and fantasy, as she strives for objectivity while imaginatively stalking the past in vivid detail: ‘fiction seems a waste – there’s a frisson about something being true’.

There is a masterful omniscience about this biography, which at times feels like having an aerial view over the places and characters described. The diary is one of many tangible objects, which make up the fabric of this story. Isabella was at the centre of great scientific and artistic breakthroughs in the 1850s. The man she was accused of having an affair with, Edward Lane, set up the first health spa, which was frequented by Darwin and Dickens; one enthusiast remarked that the vapour bath treatment was: ‘...exactly that of being baked very gently and soothingly in a pie’ from which you emerge ‘as warm as a toast, as fresh as a four-year-old, and as ravenous as an ostrich’.
Isabella was also friends with the phrenologist George Combe, who diagnosed her as being highly 'amative' after inspecting the shape of her head. This cast a shadow over Isabella, who from then onwards in her diary refers to her sexuality as if it were scientifically proven to be abnormal. Isabella’s diary was part of this era of experimentation and reveals the infancy of a more modern vision for female sexuality and the role of women. In writing this book, Summerscale felt that finally: ‘we could read her diary in a way that the Victorians could not have done. I wanted to be the reader she was reaching for".

What do scout girls do? "We'll have a gay time"

I was first bewitched by scout diaries after discovering one for sale on eBay, with a tantalizing page that read in large chaotic child's handwriting: 'Lost kite up a telegraph pole'. The scout diaries from our collection reveal another world through the smallest amount of information, leaving the imagination to fill in the rest. Like a heavy velvet curtain of the past drawing up, behind which the scouts can be found playing out their days in an era of innocent games, churchgoing and role models, where best friends have nicknames like Hoppie Pantyweist and Pussy Cummings.

An 8 year old from Norfolk, called Jean, has a section in her scout diary where she is meant to list 'Entertainments I have been to' - instead she writes in capital letters underlined in thick black ink, the boldest stand-out statement of the entire diary: 'I do not go to such things I am a religious Minister's daughter'. Alongside moral guidelines and attempts to 'do a good deed every day' dark undercurrents emerge. The diary of a 12 year old girl scout, called Kay, from Massachusetts, in 1937 is pepped up with Coca-Cola and visits to the movies, as well as casual remarks that reveal the prejudices of the time, ingrained in her culture:

September 30th 1937

Jigg's birthday. Played a game of field hockey. That's a wonderful game! Lost 3 pounds since school started Believe it or Not Ripley. Dartmouth play Amherst Sat. Got a letter from Dovie. She is a Jew. I wasn't sure before.

At the back of Kay's diary there are song lyrics from the 1927 musical 'Show Boat' about the struggles of African Americans in the US at the time. The lyrics to this song were changed several times during this period as people debated the use of the word 'nigger'. Kay chooses to stick to the original and records it in the diary perhaps for singing around the campfire on a balmy night with Pussy and Hoppie:

Niggers all work on the Mississippi,

Niggers all work while de white folks play,

...Don't look up an' don't look down

You don' dar'st make de white boss frown

Bend your knees an' bow your head

An' pull dat rope until you're dead

Strange Spells in Illinois

A collection of diaries from the 1870s - 1900, kept by a landlady called Ms Love, who ran a boarding house in Carbondale, Illinois, begin as a robust, domestic account of the residents coming and going: "buckwheat cakes and coffee for breakfast as usual"... laundry arriving by sled in the snow, making peach shortbread and pickled beans. Lodgers take tea and supper together and play music afterwards in the front parlour, usually the weather is storming outside with severe Southern thunder and gales - often it's "too cold to quilt".

The diaries are rich in detail and visual, but there's a disappointing lack of bootlegging or drama; all is reassuring bustle, moving furniture about, hanging stag antlers above doorways. Nostalgia is the only creaking detail which foreshadows the darker direction the diaries take on in later years: "Remember 27 years ago tonight, Mother and I stood in the front room and heard the East wind roar over the tree tops".

In 1885 a shift occurs, after Ms Love suffers "strange spells between 3 & 4 AM... a Babel, a tangled brain - could not speak a word... have not had such a spell since I was 12 years old..." From then on the diaries become weighted towards long descriptions of the household cats, as Ms Love starts adopting strays and invalid kittens, who she nurses in "rockers" on the front porch. There is an elliptical quality about the gradual emptying of the boarding house, unremarked by Ms Love, so that the reader, over a hundred years later, is left with a picture of a once bustling house, now overrun by cats crying, limping from room to room, beneath the howling storms of the deep South.

Faber & Castell

I came across a cabinet of antiques in a shop called M. Goldstein recently, run by a maniacal character called Nathanial, with objects ranging from old business cards, to curious nuts and seeds (strictly not for sale), and among all this was a tiny Faber & Castell diary pencil, the lead worn down, the crooked nib sharpened by hand with a knife. But where was the diary? Among Irving Finkel’s collection of abandoned diaries is an entire box crammed with these little pencils: “I keep them for use as propaganda to show how diaries disappear; only their pencils survive”.

Sonar

In post war Germany the novelist Walter Kempowski began amassing diaries, letters, reports and other kinds of unpublished autobiographical documents by witnesses of the Second World War in an attempt to tap into stories and experiences which might otherwise be lost. He called it 'Das Escholot', meaning 'Sonar' or 'Echo-Sounder' - a method of using sound waves for underwater navigation.

The project became vast and sprawling, like many collectors, Kempowski appeared to be seeking for a higher form of order, or as the historian Philip Blom describes: "...a hidden law among the innumerable individual objects of his treasure trove. In the event, he has orchestrated the disparate voices into a gigantic and frightening whole ...things can be catalogued and arranged in patterns, but ultimately they lead the honest observer to an admission of defeat."

Novelistic touches gleaned from the evidence are never far away: birds building their nests from debris in bombed buildings, the hysterical rants of Hitler's testament juxtaposed cunningly with wild looting, Thomas Mann records a visit to the hairdresser, while Paul Valery catalogues phobias he shares with Goethe. It is these two aspects, the polyphonous and the individual, which mould Das Echolot into one of the great and tragic monuments of German post-war literature.

Dolphin Feasts, Fleas & Lord Flashheart

Edward Hall's collection of diaries are kept in a small archive in Leigh, a short bus ride from Wigan. Driving through this northern underbelly, past rows of ex-docker houses, George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) comes to mind; a memoir drawn from diary extracts and letters of a winter spent lodging in the back of a tripe shop, sharing a room with an elderly miner and a Scottish invalid. During his time there Orwell may well have come across bookseller and diary collector, Edward Hall on his book stall at Wigan market.

Today Wigan hums with afternoon ennui, people shuttling back and forth between the town centre and the outskirts, in no hurry; strip clubs and fish and chip shops streaking past the bus window. The Hall collection is currently being transcribed and uploaded onto the Wigan archive website by students and volunteers. The collection when gathered together is impressive. Each volume is mummified in muslin cloth to preserve them and the individual volumes are tied together with ribbon.

Highlights include a schoolboy's diary from 1813, which describes an infestation of fleas, as well as his unrelenting nosebleeds, the thick parchment pages occasionally reveal blood stains... Another diary from 1789, a naval log book, records a sea voyage to Jamaica, is inscribed on the opening page with only a few words that capture the sense of the author’s exultation in adventure:

Littleton Powis'... April the third 1789... Written at Sea... Remember... Farewell...

Light airs & calms with small flying showers _____

... a good many dolphins about the ship. Our boat-swain struck one... of which we made a hearty dinner next day. They are very good fish...

The archivist in charge of the collection, Alex Miller, has now fully transcribed the diaries of a fighter pilot from the First World War, whose narrative comes as "near to Lord Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth as is possible without becoming parody":

Thursday Feb 25th... Slept like a top! Bright Cloudless day. NW wind. Rather misty. I dug Shepherd out of bed at 7 am and he took me down to the aerdrome in his Rolls Royce. The engine still went round, so I pushed off. She was in a better mood today so I flew at 3000 in the sunshine & felt happy... I intended to circle over Ewhurst by way of a farewell to Gen BP, but over Robertsbridge my engine again got very tired. I had a second breakfast with the General & Lady BP who seemed quite pleased to be visited by air! The Gen had cut his knee, but hobbled out on two sticks to see the machine.

John Clare's Orison

There has been an ongoing literary obsession in the last few years with the diaries of 18th century poet John Clare, the self-taught 'Peasant Poet'. Clare famously describes his escape from a lunatic asylum in his evocative, fugue-like Journey Out of Essex (1841), racing through fields, sleeping in ditches, hallucinating old dead lovers, pursuing milk maids and following church spires on the edge of the horizon, or 'Orison', as he spells it.

Iain Sinclair went on to retrace Clare's footsteps in his memoir, Edge of the Orison (2005), followed by Adam Foulds' fictional account of the same journey, The Quickening Maze (2009). Sophie Scraplehorn's work with maps (2008), in which she cuts out all the names of places, creates a similar feeling of loss in a landscape; Clare's wandering 'in the blue mist' where 'the orisons edge surrounds'.

I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures & discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit & see into is secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water.

John Clare