Tuesday 9 June 2015

The Poetry School Workshop

Bishopsgate Institute Library, London, 27 Jun 2015, Open to all, Workshop with Julia Bird 
During this event I will take you on a guided tour of the collection’s highlights in search of inspiration, discussing the varied impulses and styles of the diaries that have been building over the past couple of years at Bishopsgate Institute. Then you’ll work on a series of diary-related reading and writing activities with Julia Bird from The Poetry School. Expect to be leafing through Larkin, MacNeice, Olds, Nin, Borodale and other diary-lovers, and bring a favourite published diary to work with (real or fictional, anything from Pepys to Bridget Jones). If you’re feeling brave, bring one of your own...We will be looking at:

* Innocence and teenage diaries
Logbooks and the Quantified Self
* Sex, Secrecy & Code
* Wartime Diaries
* Digital Diaries

For each section of the day, I will be introducing you to relevant themed extracts from The Great Diary Project archive and then Julia will be suggesting writing and reading tasks based on those themes.

Further information:

http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/dear-diary.php

http://campus.poetryschool.com/dear-diary-interview-laura-barnicoat/


Sunday 22 February 2015

A treat talking to a lady

In this diary William Chalmers reports from on board a naval ship in Nieuport Belgium in 1915. In between being shelled by the Germans 'firing all day', he receives a visit from 'a beautiful widow Mrs Wynne by name she is a Red Cross lady and it was a treat talking to a lady after all our troubles.'

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Traveling Diaries

Over the last few months The Great Diary Project has put together a collection of children's diaries for an exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood in east London. The oldest diaries in the show are borrowed from the intriguing Edward Hall collection in Wigan, which the archivist Alex Miller kindly brought down to London. The diaries were then taxied around between Bishopsgate Institute, the bookbinder conservation department at the V&A in South Kensington and then finally to the Museum of Childhood where they will be on display until October.

I like the idea that these diaries have been travelling around on journeys completely unknown to their authors. Some of them seem particularly unexpected behind the glass museum cases they've found themselves in, such as the diary of a young coal miner apprentice in 1838 who describes in an understated style how a fellow miner was killed by a block of falling ice and how later that day he went ice skating on the frozen river Tyne, before going home and shooting a blackbird. Another by the young Raleigh Trevelyan in 1813 vaguely documents a mysterious illness and the attempted cures he underwent of leeching and rhubarb draughts. The quiet and solitary essence of diary writing still surrounds these books, but here they are on public display, opened out and pinned down like butterflies.

http://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/the-great-diary-project

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-great-diary-project-the-survival-of-the-permanent-life-archive-9334751.html

http://www.historyextra.com/feature/revealed-childrens-diaries-chart-ww2-life-victorian-britain-and-bed-bugs-during-napoleonic-w

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2624200/Confessions-crushes-stolen-kisses-200-years-teenage-diaries.html



Thursday 14 November 2013

Jane Eyre and Rabbit Food

We are working on an exhibition about The Great Diary Project for the V&A at the moment and I'm researching stories and characters. The other day I came across the diary of an incredibly ambitious teenage girl from 1930s Lincolnshire. On each page she writes in minute handwriting lists of books she has to read in order to get into university, along with extreme regimes of hockey practice and homework. Among all this exhausting and prim schoolgirl activity, she also mentions something strange: 'went to the alley and gathered rabbit food...went to the bottom of the garden for rabbit food'. The oddity of this repeated reference began to take on a Donnie Darko-esque quality for me while reading. Stefan Dickers, the Head Librarian at Bishopsgate and member of the Diary team, suggested it might be code for cigarettes, which makes a nice story of a chain-smoking young girl desperately trying to finish Jane Eyre before ducking out for another fag down the alley.


The Great Diary Project Film


Masterful camerawork by Rebecca Thomas and crafty editing from Lee Barnett...

Tuesday 16 October 2012

The Pursuit of Parallels


I met academic Adam Smyth in his office in Bloomsbury, which turned out to be part of Virginia Woolf’s old house – his room perhaps once served as a bathroom to the Woolf household. It was a hot late-summer afternoon; light streamed in through the window, illuminating piles of books and papers – academia in a heatwave some how brings Philip Larkin to mind. 
I got in touch with Smyth after reading his excellent book Autobiography in Early Modern England, which describes how life writing began with financial account books. It is perhaps these origins that still lend the medium a sense of authenticity, truthfulness and the obsessive compulsive Pooterish quality of listing and dating specific events and quantities.
It's useful meeting someone in their office as you’re surrounded by their work and ideas – Smyth’s floor to ceiling bookshelves displayed the type of fragmentary, unorthodox, literary ideas that interest him. A side table was strewn with flyers for an upcoming conference he was organizing based on ‘Book Destruction’ and ‘Missing Texts’, as he explained: ‘I’m interested in obscured texts – defaced, cancelled, burnt– the pulping and cutting up of text... in some cases books have been eaten...’ I could see immediately that diaries fitted into this category as a form that is often thrown away, burnt, shredded, but eaten? More on this later...
During his research into the origins of autobiography he discovered that four kinds of text appeared at his desk with particular frequency: the printed almanac annotated with handwritten notes, the financial account, a common place book, and the parish register. Smyth goes on to describe in detail how these forms merged and bled into each other so that within an ordered conventional printed format individual personal comments would be added and life writing began.
Smyth argues however, that this didn’t exactly give way to a new culture of individualism often associated with the Renaissance, but instead perpetuated a culture of copying, or as Smyth eloquently puts it: ‘the pursuit of parallels’. People sought to explain themselves and shape their identitites by quoting others, by connecting their life with figures from the past, for example the “Royalist Sir John Gibson who was imprisoned in Durham Castle in the 1650s conceived of his life as a retelling...as one more iteration of a type from Ulysses and Ovid”. In our own collection I can see how this is true - many diarists quote from other texts and mysterious half-remembered sentences lifted from unknown sources appear, faintly penciled in - fleetingly you feel the pressing nature of a sentence that had obviously been running through their mind all day. I was struck recently by a series of pocket diaries from the 1950s written by a man on business trips between Stockholm and London, which included several drifting lines of romantic poetry.
Life writing began as an obscured form fighting its way out of the margins of prescribed text – the human need to articulate their own experience is felt here, but often placed behind smoke screens of other people’s language. 

Saturday 25 August 2012

The Dioramas


A few months ago, while recording material for a radio programme about the project we were introduced to Stefan Dickers, the magnificent librarian of Bishopsgate Institute in east London. It was excellent timing – not only does Stefan have a wonderful voice for radio but also a great passion for diaries, social history and dynamic ambitions for his library. We began meeting there to discuss the future direction of the project, started making a film and cataloguing some of the existing collection, as well as new diaries brought to us in response to the Radio 4 programme in June, which was brilliantly produced by Tamsin Hughes and highlighted on ‘Pick of the Week’...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhi9xKGGWX8&feature=plcp

The recent acquisitions include a series of elegant Christian Dior diaries written by a journalist working on News Chronicle in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, who notoriously declared in an article at the time that Marilyn Monroe was a frump ‘with a spare tyre’. Her precisely written, neat little volumes of appointment diaries came with a black and white Film Noir style photo of the writer looking glamorous – no spare tyre in sight. Another unusual arrival was a collection of diaries that spanned over 20 years depicting an almost identical daily sketch of the diarist’s face and a weather update.

At the same time as we began working at Bishopsgate, Stefan also invested in a set of beautifully restored dioramas depicting scenes of 19th century life in east London – dimly lit bars and markets on cobbled streets, inhabited by tiny gloomy looking figures complete with real human hair. The dioramas were brought in for display at Bishopsgate and given a launch party accompanied by a live soundtrack of Django Reinhardt style music. Here in the library the faded dioramas twinkled weakly across the room with their tiny Victorian lamplights – finally being gazed into again after years under dust in the back room of an east end pub. It seems possible to draw parallels between the diorama and the diary, which both give magical vignettes of small-scale scenarios, somewhat clumsily placed.