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