Digital Mitford Journal Project

This area of our website hosts an edition of Mary Russell Mitford's journal, which she kept from late December 1818 to March 1823. Mitford wrote her short entries nearly every day for a little over four years in a volume designed only to hold one year of entries. That volume was a production of Leigh Hunt’s, The Literary Pocket Book: or, Companion for the Lover of Art and Nature, a kind of almanac meant for keeping daily records and including quotations from Edumnd Spenser as well as contemporary poets including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. A lengthy portion of the volume included lists of eminent persons in letters, philosophy, and the arts from the most remote aeras, as well as contemporary authors, artists, musicians, medical lecturers, and locations of theaters, art exhibits, sculpture galleries, circulating libraries, and practical information on law, bankers, money, and stamps. It seems to have been an almanac of practical information for those interested in the arts and literature, with a central section devoted to keeping daily diary entries for the year 1819. Mitford received the volume as a Christmas present from her father in 1818, and she wrote rapturously of it to her friend, Sir William Elford in a letter of 9 January 1819.

I have just had a very pretty little present The Literary Pocket Book. Have you seen one of them ? They are edited I believe by Leigh Hunt certainly the greater part is written by him & exceedingly well written. I have seen nothing of the sort so well executed. First of all there is a Naturalist’s Calendar very beautifully written—indeed those not quite extensive enough for the title It should rather have been called the Florist's Calendar—& even then it would seem a little suburbian—rather Hampstead Heathish—but very pretty nevertheless—Then in the common pocket book part—the months & weeks & days there are occasional notices of birth days of great men—Bacon Shakespeare & so forth, which come upon one very pleasantly—Then lists of Artists Musicians Actors & Authors (only think of their having left me out! That Authorial list is very incomplete indeed! Not one word about me! And my own friends too! Ah they have no idea that I am blueish to borrow my friend the Dandy’s phrase—He would have stuck me at the head of the list) well these catalogues notwithstanding this great omission are very gratifying—& then there is Poetry—not quite so good as I expected from Mr. Hunt, Mr. Keats, &c but still much better than ever adorned a pocket book before—[good] enough to stare & wonder how it came there. If you wa[nt] such a book I would recommend it to you.

For all her effusions over the densely printed contents of the pocket book, Mitford would overwrite a large portion of that print matter with regular entries over four years plus a few months in a diary designed for just one year. She drew her own lines separating the entries and marked headings keeping track of months and years. The journal is a daunting challenge to any transcriber, and the Digital Mitford team is grateful to the anonymous transcriber(s) who prepared a typescript of her entries dated 1955 and stored at the British Library. We have prepared our edition of Mitford’s Journal by first entering the text from our photofacsimile of the typescript and then carefully checking against our photofacsimile of the handwritten journal prepared for us by the British Library. The 1955 typescript was not always complete, and sometimes we have been able to fill in missing portions and identify words and proper names. Both the 1955 typescript and our edition attempt to represent only Mitford’s writings in the journal, rather than include the printed material on the page surfaces.

We have organized our web reading interface for the Journal edition to store one month of journal entries on each page. A navigation menu on the left assists in choose year, month, and day. As usual across the Digital Mitford website, we highlight named entities for which we provide information on the right. . Where we supply editorial notes on some of the entries, these are set apart typographically from Mitford's writing in small formatted blocks.