Sixth tutorial

Presentation by DvZ
Napoleon's Diaries – which is the genuine one? These were dictated by N in final exile on St Helena to four followers (Bertrand, Gourgaut, Las Cases and Montholon) who had accompanied him into exile, then drafts corrected by N. – done as response to articles, reviews &c (e.g. one by Jomini on his conduct of Italian campaign of 1797) appearing about him which he wished to rebut – no access to his papers (back in France) – some access to books owned by officers in garrison. Vol 1 Court of 1st Empire – divorce of Josephine – Vol 2 44 'notes' – Vol 3 military history of Louis XIV's Marshal Turenne. Followers quit St H within 3 years (each publishes claiming his version the genuine one) – why didn't he write his own? – strictness of regime imposed governor Hudson Lowe. Impression that these written as "swatting flies" rather than self-justification – concentration on military matters – (virtually?) none on civil.

Presentation by MO
Edward Gibbon's Memoirs – put together by Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield) from 6 overlapping MSS. Moderately prosperous upbringing – sickly eldest of 7 siblings – only one to survive – small and moon-faced – seminal visit to Stourhead (c.f. Pliny's villa) where buildings and library fired interest in Byzantium (and Arabs, Persians, Tartars, Turks) – Magdalen Oxford aged 16 – inadequacy of narrow classical teaching for person of his bent – "port and prejudice" – conversion to RCism – sent to Lausanne to live with moderate Protestant minister – engagement to Mlle Curchod – on return to England marriage forbidden by father – "I wept like a lover but obeyed like a son" - (Mlle C m. Necker , becomes mother of Mme de Stael) – persuades father to give him Grand Tour rather than rotten borough – in Italy starts 'database' of classical inscriptions – discrepancy between journal of 1764 and seminal paragraph* at start of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (due to Religion and Barbarism?) – former points to Santa Maria d'Aracoeli on site where Sybil forecast to Augustus birth of King of the World (=JC) – vol 1 of DFRE published in 1776 (=Wealth of Nations, US Dec. Of Ind.), then vols 2-3 written in UK and vols 4-6 in Lausanne in house of friend David #, who leaves it to EG on death. His sickness – hydrocele – death after third draining.

* It was at Rome... as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

Discussion on political autobiography,
based on Alan Clarke's Diaries
No PAB by PM until C20 – Balfour – after WSC, all – Thatcher cabinet ministers (practically) all – row over cabinet confidentiality with Richard Crossman's diaries – palaver over 50>30-year rule and personal embargoes. Clarke: arch snob – lust for (i) exclusivity (ii) women – indifferent career until late entry (aetat 45) MP – odious (AC a "S. H. one T." says widow, "but nobody quite like him") – "makes Flashman look like a gentleman" – but diaries v. readable (and good argument for tripling MPs' salaries, so that not just idle rich and political anoraks stand?). Good descriptor of Thatcher years? Other political diaries – Chips Channon, Piers Morgan, Chris Mullen, Giles Brandreth – AC/GB's recipe for successful political diary = 4 'I's: Immediate ("on the day"), Indiscrete ("name names"), Intimate ("mention that we're eating tea cakes"), Indecipherable (whatever did they mean?) – chorus of "Where's the fifth one, 'I' for Ego?"

A false move: reading for the bar

Warning In my post Online Autobiographies I stated my intention of using this blog to write something about my earlier life when something that happened recently reminded me about it. Today's post is about an incident or a period in my past, and not about what appears at the top of the page, On the Biography Course at the University of Buckingham. It is written so that it can be put together at the end of the course with other similar posts to be my rough-and-ready memoir: these will be of possible interest only to my kith and kin.

I had an e-mail from Vicki on Monday in which she wrote

I am having a lot of pleasure reading your blogs, loved the recent one about Jonny on the 5/11. I was grateful at his funeral for you explaining the REAL Jon to his friends in the congregation. Everyone asked me if you were a barrister... which Jon thought you would be.

This recalled to me my abortive effort in my early forties to become a barrister. Now that I sit down to try and write about it I am dismayed about how little I remember about that time. Browsing through Alan Clarke's The Last Diaries yesterday evening in preparation for today's tutorial I was comforted to read I am not alone in this. He wrote

Earlier I had done a teeny home movie on 'Eton during the war', masterminded by a boy/beak team. And was disconcerted at how thin were my memory and my recollections

I had by 1975 been running my washroom hygiene company Waterloo Services for five years and I was getting bored. I had developed the method of selling contracts for our quarterly treatments sufficiently well so that I could employ others to take over the sales function. Turnover was building up nicely and I convinced the company's reluctant chairman that I could administer the company's continued growth and read for the bar at the same time.

I got a couple of barristers (my neighbour and boon companion, SKO'M, and the cox of the college boat when we were both up at Trinity, WKT) to propose and second me for admission as a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, enrolled for a correspondence course with the College of Law at Braboeuf Manor, ate the first of my obligatory dinners and began to read Cheshire and Fifoot's Contract Law.

At this point I am going to stop. My excuse is that I need to get my things together and drive to Bicester North to take the train to London* Marylebone for our weekly tutorial, but perhaps the truth of the matter is that I find it difficult to write about such an unsuccessful episode in my life. At least I've admitted that I didn't cut the mustard as a would-be barrister. Perhaps I'll be able to come back to this later, like a dog to its vomit, and add some further words about this failed venture.

* Sutton's Law must explain why a couple of the University of Buckingham's postgraduate courses now carry out their teaching in London and not on campus, ten minutes' walk from home. Sutton's Law is named after the bank robber Willie Sutton, who reputedly replied to a reporter's inquiry as to why he robbed banks by saying "because that's where the money is." Wikipedia reports that in his ghosted autobiography Willie denies ever having said it. Who's to say?

Remembrance Sunday

Julia and I have just observed the Two Minutes' Silence, sitting late over our breakfast. We had decided not to go to our Buckingham church of St Peter and St Paul, just three minutes walk up Bristle Hill and then right along Castle Street. She will be going on Wednesday to Friends' Meeting in Aylesbury on the actual eleventh day of the eleventh month when the armistice ending the war was signed. Then it was known as the Great War and dubbed The War To End Wars. Only after an even bloodier war was it renamed World War One.

Her father's eldest brother, Claud, was killed on the Western Front serving in the Royal Naval Division. Most unusually, none of my close relations were killed. My father joined the fledgling Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1914 but, when it appeared that there was nowhere it could usefully serve, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and in 1915 was shipped off to the Mediterranean theatre. After a while he reckoned that stitching people up to fight again was morally no different from fighting himself, which is why he joined the Royal Flying Corps in Egypt. Many young Quaker men went through the same process, reckoning that their pacifism had to be put aside because this was a Just War. I never asked him more about all this. I still wonder how much he made these changes on moral grounds rather than because he was just attracted by the life of action of a pilot.

My thoughts turned during that silence to the poem For Johnny by John Pudney, written on the back of an envelope during an air raid on London in 1941.

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

JFR aged 27: AGR aged 20

This led naturally to my thinking about my brother Johnny and how I had used this poem at the end of the address I gave at his funeral in January 1997. This eulogy is not the only thing I want to write about this splendid chap whose life was blighted by Parkinsons at an unnaturally early age. He started writing an autobiography about this which he titled with typical wit A Hole in the Head – a reference also to the trepanning operation that temporarily halted the disease's inexorable impact. I must ask Vicki whether the manuscript still exists.

John Fisk Randall 1927–1996

We are come together in this quiet country church [Motcombe, Dorset] to say farewell to Johnny, the husband of Vicki, the father of Sali, Simon and Jamie, the grandfather of Jake, Ben and Jas, the son of Harry (widely known as George) and Elsie (widely known as Katie), the brother of Pushie and me, and the relation or friend of many of us gathered here today.

Those of you who only met Johnny during the second half of his life can have little idea of what manner of man he was during the first half of it, before he was afflicted by the cruel disease from whose clutch he has now been mercifully released. Let me therefore tell such of you something about Johnny Randall in his prime.

As he was growing up he was active in all the sorts of ways that you would expect of a lively and spirited boy. His activities with Meccano were a foretaste of what he would achieve later as an engineer and a formidable tinkerer with cars. George encouraged his interest in photography, something with a natural appeal to someone who combined an artistic temperament with mechanical aptitude. This interest developed alongside his early interest in astronomy. He took this very seriously. I remember him seeking to persuade George to let him remove a portion of the roof of Sandilands, the family home, so that he could create his own observatory in the attic, and being most indignant when this (in his view, perfectly reasonable) request was turned down. Despite this setback, he became the youngest member of the Royal Astronomical Society and maintained an interest in stars in their courses throughout his life.

It was as an athlete, though, that he really made his mark. At Leighton Park, the Quaker school he went to, there was an outstanding gym teacher, known and revered by generations of Leightonians as Hoppy. He was a peppery little Welshman who exhorted us to impossible gymnastic feats. Johnny responded enthusiastically to these exhortations: although he was large in stature for a gymnast, he twice won the school gymnastics championship. I remember him and a friend, during the summer holidays, competing to see who could do the highest number of consecutive flick-flacks up and down the lawn at Sandilands.

On this same lawn I remember him batting in the nets to the bowling of a couple of local lads that George had hired to help develop his cricketing talents. They were twins: they were Alec and Eric Bedser, who went on to great heights wearing the chocolate brown caps of Surrey and the white one of England.

These scenes epitomise the memories that I have of Johnny as he was growing into young manhood and developing into a stylish and versatile athlete.

• Put a cricket bat into his hands, and he transforms it into a willow wand wafting the ball past cover point to the boundary: Johnny captained the 1st XI at Leighton Park.
  
• Tie a pair of rugger boots to his feet, and he is a vigorous, mauling wing forward: Johnny played in the 1st XV for his school and for his college.
  
• Let him get hold of an oar, and he is rowing up the Cam in the power house of the King's College Rugger Boat: the crew dubbed themselves 'Poetry in Motion' which may have been some consolation for being bumped more than they bumped-but bumped, let it be said, by full-time wet-bobs.
  
• Give him a racket, and he is volleying and smashing on the lawn tennis court: he played for the King's 1st VI.
  
• Strap a pair of skis to his feet and he is sinuously sliding clown an alp with his skis perfectly parallel: well, pretty parallel!
  

In the athletic sphere, it can truly be said of Johnny that Nihil tetigit quem non ornavit: he touched nothing that he did not adorn.

This list of his athletic accomplishments should not lead us to ignore his academic achievements. He read engineering at London University and economics at Cambridge, although I am sure that Johnny would wish me to state on his behalf that he would never let his studies come between him and a party.

Johnny loved parties. Johnny was gregarious, Johnny was charming, Johnny was witty: the phrase, the life and the soul of the party, was doubtless first coined for some medieval or renaissance Johnny who would have rejoiced at seeing his worthy successor in full revel. I see several in the congregation today who partied with Johnny much more than did I – John Dalrymple, Mickie Chater, Mike Bate – and they will be able to regale you afterwards with details of some of the memorable thrashes they had together.

And Johnny loved motor cars. His first car, a 1933 Austin Seven, was too small and too slow for someone of Johnny's temperament, so he acquired a 1926 Ballot brougham. Those of us who are not car buffs won't necessarily know that Ballot was a French marque, and that its brougham was built as a kind of bourgeois Bugatti Royale, a huge high-performance tourer. But, as a brougham, it didn't quite mesh with Johnny's dashing image. So, what does he do? He converts it into a convertible. Even car unbuffs will know that a convertible is a car with an open body and a retractable roof. Well, Johnny manages the first stage of the conversion just fine: he removes the original coach work. It was the second stage that was the problem. We will never now know for sure whether the decision to dispense entirely with any form of protection against the elements was dictated by financial or aesthetic or practical considerations. But what we do know is that, when planning his first continental expedition in the Ballot, he found that the car ferry charges – which of course are based on length – were almost as much as he had paid for the beast in the first place. Lesser men would not have cut this particular Gordian knot in quite the same draconian manner. What does he do? He simply cuts the chassis in three, throws away the middle bit, welds together the bits left over and postpones sine die the retractable roof!

The expedition finally set out: 75% of its members are in this church today. The survivors will be able to tell you what it was like to travel in an open car in mid-winter to the Alps. Pushie will be able to tell you about other design features that made the expedition memorable. For a start, there was – of course – no heating. Secondly, there were no seats in the back. Thirdly, there was no boot, and – of course – no luggage rack. Johnny solves all three problems with characteristic simplicity and directness: get the girls to sit on hot water bottles, and then pile the luggage on top of them, and then – as the cherry on the cake – crown it all with the spare wheel! I leave it to you to judge how successful this solution was by citing the fact that Pushie has never since travelled to the Alps by car: once frost-bitten, one might say, twice Pu-shy.

This portrait I have painted might lead you to suppose that it was difficult for me to grow up as Johnny's younger brother, in his shadow: not so, even though I could never reach his athletic standards. It is the nature of a natural leader like Johnny – he was Head Boy at The Downs, he was a School Prefect at LP, he held Her Majesty's commission – to inspire others by example and to show that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? Thus it was that, in January 1952 at the Aircrew Selection Centre at RAF Hornchurch, when I was asked the question, 'Why do you want to be a pilot?', I was able to give the simple but convincing answer 'Because my father was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and my brother is learning to fly in his University Air Squadron.'

This heralded the time in our lives when he and I worked and played a great deal together. Because he had not done his National Service before going to university, it happened that he started it shortly after I had started mine. We then started our Wings courses at virtually the same time, I being posted to RAF Dalcross (now Inverness airport) to fly twin-engined Airspeed Oxfords and Johnny to RAF Cottesmore to fly single-engined Boulton Paul Balliols.

Let me read what they wrote about Johnny in the RAF Spittlegate newsletter at that time.
Officer Cadet John Randall left us a few weeks ago to join his new unit at Cottesmore, when his long-awaited transfer to the General Duties Branch came through. Johnny was a most popular member of the course and combined a remarkable number of qualities: he was a fine sportsman, a skilled technician and an excellent speaker (unrivalled as a raconteur), as well as being the holder of two university degrees and the possessor of a very wide knowledge of varied topics. Above all he was a good companion. We miss him, and wish him the very best of luck on his new Course.

The Balliol which Johnny flew at Cottesmore was exactly the right kind of aircraft for a pilot of Johnny's temperament: it was powered by the Rolls Royce Merlin, the engine that powered the fighters that won the Battle of Britain and it was highly manoeuvrable. As a gymnast, Johnny took naturally to slow rolls, stall turns and the like and went on to win his course trophy for aerobatics. However, he was less excellent at instrument flying: he failed to get his White Instrument Rating Card at his first attempt, which led me to tell Johnny that he was a better pilot upside down than the right way up.

You can imagine the spirit of friendly rivalry that there was between us. He was brotherly enough to fly up from Rutland to Scotland to attend my passing-out parade, but this did not stop me from crowing for the next fortnight at his wingless state. His magnanimity was such, however, that he did not crow over me when I was transferred to the RAF Education Branch, while he reached operational status on a Gloster Meteor fighter squadron, in the country's front line of aerial defence. Our rivalry extended to every area of life, and sometimes reached ridiculous lengths. Thus, when I received a telegram from him in 1955 saying 'Have got engaged', I promptly proposed to my then girl-friend and telegraphed back, 'Snap!'.

Johnny went on to marry Vicki, and a life that was all too soon to be blighted by the onset of Parkinson's Disease. During his gradual but inexorable physical decline, two things struck everyone who met him.

Firstly, this athlete who had rejoiced in his physical prowess never railed against his misfortune. He was a veritable Mr Standfast. More than anyone I have ever known, he was able to meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.

Secondly, the comfort and support that his wife gave him throughout his illness is beyond any words of mine to praise. Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her ... she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. Such a virtuous woman was, and is, Vicki.

Now Johnny is dead. For all of us who loved him and thought highly of him, this is a time of grief and yet it is also a time of relief, now that he is at last at rest. Let the verses I am about to say – written for another Johnny, another pilot, long ago-speak for all those who grieve for Johnny this day.

Do not despair / For Johnny-head-in-air: / He sleeps as sound / As Johnny under ground.
Fetch out no shroud / For Johnny-in-the-cloud; / And keep your tears / For him in after years.
Better by far / For Johnny the Bright Star / To keep your head / And see his children fed.

John Fisk Randall was, truly, Johnny the Bright Star. During his long illness he proved himself to be Mr Standfast: throughout his life he was also Mr Valiant-for-truth. So let me end this eulogy by telling of the death of Mr Valiant-for-truth at the end of The Pilgrims Progress.

He called for his friends and ... said he, I am going to my Fathers, and tho with great Difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.

My Sword, I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage and my Courage and Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scarrs I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his Battels, who now will be my Rewarder.

When the Day that he must go hence, was come, many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said,
Grave where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

Ave atque vale, Iohannes! Hail and farewell, Johnny!

Saturday afternoon in Oxford

I greatly appreciated getting from my fellow student RFCG an introduction to Mary Beard's blog, A Don's Life. Extracts from it have just been published in book form: here is another example of a blog metamorphosing into a book. I latched onto a point raised in a review on it in The Guardian, since it discusses a difficulty I face. Dinah Birch writes "Beard speaks of 'the husband' or 'the daughter' – turns of phrase that suggest both intimacy and distance. Blogs create a disarming illusion of personal communication, while depending on the artful construction of a voice and a point of view. … [This] resolute breeziness of her stream of opinions, calculated to produce an air of demotic informality, sometimes jars."

Indeed, indeed. I am guilty of this in the title of one of my posts, Number Two Daughter, but at least I go on immediately to name her. But I can see one very good reason why a blogger is tempted to do this: it provides immediate identification. On a blog the latest post or entry is displayed first, and is therefore the first piece that new visitors to the site will read: how will they know who Reggie (or whatever Mr Beard's first name) is, without explanation that is unnecessary to regulars? Well, actually, I think there is a way, and I'm using it now. If you really want to know my relationship to the lady named in the next sentence, just click on her name and go to the post which describes what it is.

On Saturday afternoon Julia and I went to see my old chum and new neighbour Paul in the ENT ward of the John Radcliffe in Oxford. He was in good order and looked good, if lop-sided. No wonder: they've removed a number of bits from the side of his throat leaving a long scar and a drain. Only a steel bolt was missing to complete the Frankenstein effect. The tale of the Black Pudding is, however, one like that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra for which the world is not yet prepared.

We went on to the cinema to see An Education, based on the book by Lynn Barber which is on our reading list for week eight's topic, Liberated Women. We had plenty of time before it started so we went to the bookshop next to the White Horse, the pub in which I won the university shove ha'penny championship in 1956 and about which I must one day write the droll story concerning the pub sign and Stubbs' Constitutional Charters (written, incidentally, by the bishop next door in Kettel Hall, where I had rooms when I first went up to Trinity).

Just inside the door was a pile of a new biography about Alan Clarke, whose Diaries I am reading for next week's topic, Political Autobiography. I picked a copy from the pile and resumed an ancient habit of sitting on a step-up to look through a book I had no intention of buying. I started reading the chapter on his Oxford days and, behold, a flash of gold in the stream met the prospector's eyes!

Briggs shared a flat – one of the few with telephones – in the Woodstock Road with Nicholas Ridley (later a Tory MP and Minister in Thatcher's government). Alan used to come in from time to time on the pretence of looking for Briggs, but really just so he could ring a girlfriend in New York. This did not go down well, particularly with Ridley, who bided his time, but finally got his revenge, it is said, when he was Environment Minister in the late 1980s. Legend has it that Ridley, having to decide the route of the new Channel Tunnel, instructed his officials to make sure it surfaced as close as possible to Southwood [Clarke's country seat].

Nicholas Ridley's daughter Jane runs this course. Bringing this snippet to her attention in a roundabout way is a bit like a little boy giving Teacher an apple, don't you think?

Term paper

Each of us on this course is required to submit, by November 27 (check this!), a 3,000–5,000 word essay on an approved autobiographical subject. We are also required to deliver, during one of our weekly sessions, a twenty minute discourse on an autobiographical subject.

My original intention was to write on how people use blogs to write their autobiographies but, as I indicated in my post on Thursday, it became clear that the blog format is not suitable for this purpose and my initial researches in the blogosphere did not reveal anything that could reasonably be termed an autobiography, as opposed to a diary or a journal. I intend to continue my research, widening its scope to include anything autobiographical in any format on the internet, but I do not believe that I will have anything worthwhile to report before the deadline for submission.

It has emerged that the discourse can be related to the essay, so I had the idea of taking two historically-significant figures whose autobiographies had titles which clearly indicated that their life was a quest, then looking for similarities and differences in the way their writing described how and why they set off on their quest and the results of it. Two titles which sprang to my mind were Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The juxtaposition of two such towering figures, with such radically different quests, would I felt make a most interesting study.

This seemed like a good idea until I actually looked into Mein Kampf. Of course I had been aware that a large part of it was about his views which became the doctrine of his Nazi party, but I had thought that there would be sufficient about himself and how and why these views developed to make a vivid contrast to those of Mandela. I was wrong. The first chapter, In the House of My Parents, is astonishingly unrevealing. Thus he sums up his relationship with his parents by saying "I honoured my father: I loved my mother". Even what he does say about some things such as his performance at school turns out, it appears, to be false. So this idea rapidly shows itself to be a non-starter.

So, what about somebody else in South African history? Cecil Rhodes, perhaps? Alas, nothing: no diaries, few personal papers. What about Jan Smuts? A brief memoir about part of the Boer War, and nothing else. So, what about Mandela's white contemporaries? Google rapidly reveals that F W de Clerk, the country's last white president, wrote an autobiography, The Last Trek – a New Beginning. That's it! Another title clearly indicating a quest; an author who was Mandela's adversary-cum-partner during those five crucial years in South African history; each obviously says a great deal about the other in their books.

I finished Mandela's book last week and I now need to complete de Clerk's, which is much less gripping. This should give me enough to write an essay which I provisionally entitle How the protagonists of the dismantling of apartheid regarded each other. The main question I am beginning to wrestle with is, how much of the background to apartheid (and indeed to the story of South Africa before its imposition) do I need to give? Allied to this is, what should be its structure and tone? I think I will start by trying the Wall Street Journal approach, and change it if it doesn't seem to work.

Online autobiographies: 1

Can you use a blog for publishing your autobiography?

It's an attractive idea, because you can set up a blog at no cost and start blogging within five minutes. You can then write bits and pieces about your life story and post them online whenever you will.

The snag, though, is that each piece is displayed in chronological order of posting online, with the latest displayed first. This means that at the outset you would need to plan your life story and write it at a series of posts to be uploaded in a carefully-ordered sequence. If you are going to go to this trouble, then a better policy would be to set up your own personal website on which you would be able to arrange what you write in any manner you wished.

Planning your autobiography at the outset, then writing it and building a website on which to publish it is, however, a major undertaking. Is there not a way in which the simplicity and spontaneity of a blog could be used to kick-start the whole process? I believe there is, and I am beginning to use my blog in this way. These are the steps that I intend to take.

1. When something happens in my day-to-day life which has a link to something in my past life, I can write two posts, one being my as it were diary entry and the other my autobiography entry. Thus reading as part of my course Edmund Gosse's Father and Son naturally enabled me to write about what we discussed in the tutorial about that and similar books, then to write another about my relationship with my father. Episodes, such as attending a Gaudy Dinner at my old college or reading in Neville Shute's autobiography about an aircraft, the Airspeed Oxford, which his company built and on which I trained, naturally spark off memories about which I shortly want to write.
   
2. I will now start create two separate folders within my blog folder for the original wordprocessed files which are then uploaded as posts to my blog:
   1    Chronological by date of posting to the blog
   2    Autobiographical only: chronological by date of event
   
3. Files in the autobiographical folder can eventually be merged into one master file which could be printed out to serve as a quick'n'dirty personal memoir for grandchildren or, perhaps, as the basis for a much fuller account of my life for printing out or, conceivably, dividing into pages and chapters for publication on a personal website.
   

So, my current answer to the question at the start of this post (can you use a blog for publishing your autobiography?) is, not easily and not very well.

Nonetheless this term I am, as part of my course project (examining the impact of new technology on the creation of biographies) continuing to search for websites, whether blogs or not, which can reasonably be considered to be autobiographies rather than diaries or journals. It would be excellent if this post stimulated any reader of it to add a comment below suggesting sites that it would be worth my while to visit: it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Fifth tutorial: from Whores to Virgins

The title of this post is also that of the hand-out given to us at the colloquium we had yesterday with Frances Wilson, subtitled Writing the Lives of Harriette Wilson and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Let's start, though, with the Virgin: Dorothy, younger sister of William Wordsworth, arch-Romantic, doyen of the Lakeland Poets and later Poet Laureate of Great Britain.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth has as its pivot the entry in her Grasmere journal for the day that her brother William marries Mary Hutchinson.

Flashing back from this point is the story of a young woman who was orphaned and impoverished early, then separated for a decade from her brothers. Living the life of a poor relation here and there, she craved familial security which she found when she set up house with William, a young man just back from Revolutionary France where he had fathered a child and who, unlike his three brothers, had no clear idea about what career to pursue.

Dorothy and William live in several houses, lent by friends or rented cheaply, settling at Dove Cottage in a picturesque vale in the Lake District. They walk much, they talk much, they read and write much: she records, at times in microscopic detail, what she sees in sun and rain, what flowers are blooming, what birds are flying. These entries in her journal act as the stimulus for her brother's developing poetical muse. This intimate relationship will change when her brother marries. He chooses as his wife not the pining mistress he abandoned in France but a sister in a family of similarly-orphaned siblings. Dorothy describes the dawn ceremony she and her brother performed on the wedding day.

I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me ???ly.

In the manuscript of the Grasmere journal these lines have been crossed out. Fifty years ago they were read with the aid of infra-red light and the adverb interpreted then as fervently. The whole passage, but especially the closing adverb, was for some scholars further if not final proof that the relationship between brother and sister had been incestuous. Frances had examined the journal herself when researching her book and agreed with the most recent editor of the journal that the word is softly.

After the wedding Dorothy, with her brother William and his bride Mary, returns to Grasmere where all three live contentedly together in Dove Cottage for years, until increased income and a growing family led to a move to a larger home nearby. Meanwhile nearby William's friend the poet Coleridge is falling out of love with his wife Sarah, the sister of the poet Southey, and falling in love with Mary's sister Sarah Hutchinson, thenceforward referred to as Sara. All this is the stuff of scandal.

Frances discussed the nature of the brother-sister bond as viewed at that time, being as strong if not stronger than the marital bond.

She explained to us that she had wanted to rebut those Wordsworth scholars who had sought to shield William's reputation from the slur of incest by making Dorothy a sexless and dull figure. On the contrary, young men such as the writer de Quincey fancied her as "All fire and ardour", while at the same time strong brother-sister attachments were then viewed as nothing abnormal or incestuous. Earlier biographers make much of the fact that her journals and letters report nothing of the conversations all these Romantics would have had and that they are banal and boring.

Banal and boring they indeed are, if perused as some of us did without a full awareness of all the circumstances. Banal the journals may seem until it is understood that Dorothy was writing her entries as a stimulus to William. "Dorothy had a better poetic ear", claimed Frances; two people, "Dorothy and William, make one poet." William himself said "She gave me ears, she gave me eyes".

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth is as gripping as a novel but with the merit of being as close to what actually happened as it may be possible to get. Read the Spectator review of it by clicking here or the one in The Times by clicking here, then borrow it or buy it.

Let's conclude, briefly, with the Whore: Harriette Wilson, appropriately born in Shepherd Market, Mayfair, in 1786 and 15 years later mistress to the first of many an unbelted earl.

Time in our colloquium was too limited to do more than hear why Frances' first biography, The Courtesan's Revenge: The Life of Harriette Wilson, had such a radically different subject from her second one. She explained that the first was based on researching in archives and gave little scope for ruminations on the inner woman. At the end of her researches Frances had no more idea than she had had at the beginning about what Harriette dreamed about or was afraid of: indeed, she had not even been able to find out whether Harriette had ever born a child.

So her pendulum swung to the other end of its arc, to a place where relevant material has been published and is easily accessible in libraries so that it is reflection and not archival research which is needed. It may be that the topic of her next book, the chairman of the shipping line which built the SS Titanic, will swing the pendulum (who knows how briefly?) back to the vertical.