The V&A are exhibiting a massive collection of diaries from different periods in time- At the museum of childhood- Some of them are coded- so the codes will be cracked to allow for them to be read- which is a bit mental- I couldn't imagine needing to write my blog in code!
They're all from different people, in different places with very different lifestyles- So I suppose it's Living history.
Theres just something about diaries which makes people curious!
I don't know there people, but I want to see their diaries!
On 10 May 1814 - 200 years ago today - two boys made an escape attempt from their boarding school in Brentford.
'Dixon Sr & Price ran away at 4 o'clock this morning,' one of their schoolmates confided to his diary, suitably impressed.
'They put on the best clothes, borrowed some money and dropt from the window... It was not till supper that Morris (the schoolmaster0 was told that they had gone to Eton - There was a great jaw all day about it - They came back at bedtime.'
A new exhibition at the V&A will showcase the inner thoughts of teenagers over the past 200 years
The young diarist was 14-year-old Raleigh Trevelyan, whose journal makes painful reading. His miscreant classmates were regularly beaten. 1 June 1813: 'Mitford and Rudge flogged,' he noted for posterity. 18 June: 'Heard from Mama. Had my neck washed.'
Raleigh's diary, on loan from Wigan's Edward Hall archive, is the oldest in a new display of childhood and teenage diaries at the V&A Museum of Childhood, and some entries burn with a boyish sense of injustice. 23 September: 'Had a parcel & Mr M made me open it before him and stole some of the things,' he wrote indignantly.
'So while he was reading the paper I tried to take it from him so he threatned [sic] to flog me. I mean to take things of his to make up for what he has stolen from me.'
Fortunately there were holidays to look forward to. Arriving home in London from his school in Middlesex in July 1813, young Raleigh found his family, 'All in a bustle packing for Ramsgate.'
It was a scratchy homecoming though: 'Did not get to sleep till near 4 in the morning on account of the fleas.'
It took more than 25 hours travelling by sailing barge from London to Ramsgate without any wind... but then there were donkey rides, crabbing, the shock of seeing a man drowning and the thrill of seeing a shipwreck towed in.
The new exhibition will explore the minds of teenagers across two centuries
Sadly, less than a year later Raleigh is sent home sick from school. 24 May 1814: 'Took some rhubarb, castor oil and a saline draught for a head ake,' he complains, before taking a dose of red medicine two days later.
He doesn't sound well; the doctor comes to bleed him with six leeches. The final pages of the diary show traces of blood. Raleigh died not long after. 'It's not clear what he died of, but it's a tragic end to a short life,' says archivist Alex Miller.
Most of the diaries come from the Great Diary Project Archive, which started from a collection of more than 1,500 rescued by historian Irving Finkel from house clearances, donations, on eBay or wherever they might turn up. In his day job at the British Museum, he specialises in ancient Mesopotamian script.
That explains Finkel's fascination with a 1940s wartime diary partly written in code by an anonymous teenage girl, which surfaced at a car boot sale. 'It's very rare to find a normal diary written in code,' he says.
He was determined to crack it. 'Because I work with ancient scripts, I wasn't going to let myself be beaten by a schoolgirl!' It appeared to be a simple substitution code, employing characters from other alphabets, including Greek.
'She must have got them from an encyclopaedia. You can see from the fluency that it was second nature - from which I deduced that she probably used the code with her friends.' He cracked the code with the word banana.
'There are few words in English with that pattern. She used to go dancing with GIs who treated the girls to banana splits.' It seems she used the code to describe her glamorous mother's activities as a prostitute.
Other teenage diaries capture that moment on the cusp of being a grown-up. Gill Caldwell illustrated her diary in 1952, when she was 14, portraying herself as a St Trinian's schoolgirl with a hockey stick and a cigarette in a holder.
She devoted a whole page to King George VI's funeral, and that night went to see a film of the funeral procession. 'It was terrific, but two and a half hours was quite enough! My behind was quite sore,' she said.
Timelessly, schoolgirl diaries record innocent crushes on oblivious boys. In 1937, Joan Hall from Surbiton, who started her diary when she was almost 15, obsessed over every fleeting glimpse of a boy who wore glasses. 8 November:
'"There are few words in English with that pattern. She used to go dancing with GIs who treated the girls to banana splits." It seems she used the code to describe her glamorous mother's activities as a prostitute'
'Saw Glasses. I do like him, yet I don't know if he likes me.' And the following day, segueing seamlessly from puppy love to domestic science: 'Passing my darling G - I came late with a saddlebag bulging, a music case on my handlebars and a satchel on my back... In cookery we did the Irish stew, which came out like water, plus water, mixed with water... Miss B actually thought that Joyce and I were going to eat it too.'
One of the Great Diary Project researchers is Laura Barnicoat, and her own grandmother Veronica Hadwen's diary makes up part of the archive.
At 12, Veronica was expelled from boarding school for reading Gone With The Wind. By 1947, as a man-mad 17-year-old living in Cornwall, her diary included sketches of her new wedge sandals and 'sensational' new platform shoes.
A diary entry for April that year describes a flirtation with a Desert Rat returned from the war. 'The Desert Rat was affectionate to put it mildly - he says he's 36 and also has decided to remain a lone wolf for good, that is unless I decide to marry him - is this a proposal? Perhaps - anyway he thinks I'm beautiful which is something.'
She seems to have had a racy time on a holiday in Dublin the following month. 'Brian, I think, is slightly in love with me, or of course it may just be Irish blarney... As a rule, I don't like being kissed but Fintan's kisses were very pleasant... I left him feeling utterly knocked over. He is of course quite the most unsuitable person I could find...' He certainly was, as he had TB and she had only met him that morning.
Even the most mundane diaries are a resource for historians of the future, says Irving Finkel. 'When I was a child, a new diary was a standard Christmas present.
They belong to a handwritten world that is vanishing. Blogging is no substitute. Most of us think our own lives are uninteresting to anyone else, but imagine if we had hundreds of diaries from Shakespeare's time today!'
The Great Diary Project, V&A Museum of Childhood, from 17 May. www.thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2624200/Confessions-crushes-stolen-kisses-200-years-teenage-diaries.html#ixzz31IR5JKkM
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
"Most of us think our own lives are uninteresting to anyone else, but imagine if we had hundreds of diaries from Shakespeare's time today!'
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed this post very much. Thanks for sharing.
House clearance Surbiton
No worries, it's just a shame you found the post so long after the exhibition ended!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughts! :D