Recent reading

The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde (written 1758-1802; edited and published by John Beresford, 1935). James Woodforde (1740-1803) was a well-to-do country clergyman in the eighteenth century, living first in Somerset where he was curate in his father's parish, and later in his own living at Weston Longeville in Norfolk. His diaries, which cover the period from his years as an undergraduate at Oxford right up until shortly before his death, have been published in various more or less abridged forms; not feeling up to the very detailed editions, I read the shortest one-volume version, which is still a fairly respectably-sized book. And it's a veritable treasure-trove of fascinating and detailed information on daily life in the English countryside in the second half of the eighteenth century. I could go on for some time about all the interesting things Woodforde writes about—let me make a list:

• The weather, including—in what was still the Little Ice Age—some very memorable cold winters, with milk freezing in the dairy and chamber-pots under the beds.
• The round of social visiting which formed much of the daily business of life for people of Woodforde's class, including the highly elaborate dinners they served each other—Woodforde is very thorough in describing food!
• The duties of a country clergyman, in a Church which is very much pre-Oxford Movement and Evangelical Revival, but still pious in its way; as well as saying prayers and preaching, christening, marrying and burying, Woodforde keeps up various charitable traditions, such as giving pennies to local children on Valentine's Day and dinners to his poor elderly neighbours at Christmas.
• Money, buying and selling; Woodforde is meticulous about account-keeping and detailing how much money he paid for all sorts of different things, from food to wigs to travel to small-scale gambling at cards, as well as money received in tithes and for the sale of things like butter.
• Travel in the days before railways: Woodforde often makes the short journey to Norwich and also undertakes longer journeys, to London and to visit his family in Somerset; here he details the arrangements of coach travel, distances and costs and timings and the state of the roads and dinners at inns etc. etc.
• Social relations; the position of servants in an eighteenth-century parsonage, what they do and how they get on with their betters. Things are clearly less hierarchical than they became in the nineteenth century, and there's an amount of familiarity and social equality alongside the economic inequality.
• Major historical events and how they go on in the background of everyday life in a quiet corner of the world. There are often casual references to things like the War of American Independence alongside the details of daily life at Weston; later, when the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars get going, Woodforde writes about all the effects the wars overseas have at home.
• All sorts of random idiosyncratic things Woodforde does, as interesting historical examples of things an eighteenth-century clergyman might do: buying smuggled rum and busying himself in hiding the bottles, encouraging inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, treating a couple of maidservants he meets while travelling to dinner at the inn, catching a spider in his rooms and deciding to keep it as a pet, dealing with various sorts of social frictions and minor conflicts, reading Evelina, taking rhubarb as a medicine, launching a model ship on his garden pond, and so on.
• All sorts of stuff about the rhythms of eighteenth-century life in general.
• etc. etc. etc

Endlessly fascinating, and Woodforde's personality and writing style make for pleasant reading throughout. Thoroughly recommended for anyone who takes an interest in this period, and especially for anyone writing historical fiction who wants lots of detail to use in their work!

(...perusing Woodforde's Wikipedia page, I notice that his eldest sister, born in 1725, was christened Sobieski! Er, if that indicates what I think it does about the family political allegiances, James himself appears to have been a perfectly respectful supporter of the Georges. Perhaps there was some other connection to the royal Polish Sobieskis?).

Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain by Matthew Engel (2009). This month's book club book. A history of the British railways from the 1830s to the present, their development, management and mismanagement—which made an interesting contrast having just read an 18th century book with so much detail about what travel was like before the railways! I enjoyed the historical parts of this book, especially the account of just how chaotic the development and proliferation of different lines and railway companies in the mid-nineteenth century was, speculative bubbles and whimsical obscure names and all. I was less interested in the more modern political stuff, and I did find the author pretty obnoxious—a certain smug superiority throughout, a too-neat journalist's writing style which I found got in the way of the interesting details.