BEASTLY SNEAKS: Based on the idea of creating a diary archive, where people can send personal collections of diaries to be securely stored for future reference, below is a record of diary related stories and ideas... 'Beastly Sneaks' is a phrase taken from the diary of the young Godfrey Williams, 1887, which opens with the warning: "Take Notice - All persons who look at this diary without my leave are Beastly Sneaks..."
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.
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As a keeper of rabbits, may I suggest that she may, in fact, have been picking grass and herbs to feed her pet? Part of the attraction with rabbits is that they are vegetarian and can be fed cheaply on vegetation picked from the environs of gardens and alleyways. I understand that it was not uncommon at that time for women and children to keep rabbits either to generate an income by harvesting their fibre for spinning, in the case of angoras, or indeed to provide meat for the family dinner table.
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