Abstract
Where the previous chapter began with Elizabeth Barrett’s ambivalent opening to a diary she soon stopped keeping, this chapter starts with Arthur Munby’s efforts to stop a diary he could not seem to end. A barrister and minor poet, Munby is best known today as the secret lover and husband of Hannah Cullwick, a maid-of-all-work whose own diaries, kept at his behest, have become a touchstone for Victorian working-class women’s writing.1 But Munby is also notable for being one of nineteenth-century Britain’s most indefatigable diarists. His extant manuscripts include sixty-four volumes of diaries kept between 1859 and 1898, thirty-one volumes entitled Hannah and Visits to Hannah that consist largely of diary-like entries, and twelve notebooks of miscellaneous diary entries and sketches, mainly from vacations in Britain and abroad.2
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Notes
See Liz Stanley, ed., The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984).
Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London: John Murray, 1972), 400.
Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England,” in Sex and Class in Womens History, ed. J. L. Newton, M. P. Ryan, and J. R. Walkowitz (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 31.
Michael Hiley, Victorian Working Women: Portraits from Life (London: Fraser, 1979), 14.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 77.
Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 73.
McClintock, Imperial Leather, 77; Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion, 2002), 75.
For one recent exception to this rule, see Rick Allen, “Munby Reappraised: The Diary of an English Flaneur,” The Journal of Victorian Culture 5.2 (Autumn 2000): 260–86.
William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), 80.
Edmund Shorthouse, A Present to Youths and Young Men, vol. 2 (Birmingham, England, 1891), 924.
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839; London: Penguin, 1989), 241.
For manuscript diaries, see John Stuart Batts’ British Manuscript Diaries of the Nineteenth Century (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976).
C. S. Handley, An Annotated Bibliography of Diaries Printed in English, 3rd ed. (Tyne and War: Hanover Press, 2003).
Francis Bacon, “Of Travaile,” The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 56.
Arthur Ponsonby, More English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1927), 18.
Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 168.
Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1923), 11.
Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 3.
Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century Emigrants (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 58, 21.
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, eds., Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xix.
Joss Marsh, “Spectacle,” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert Tucker (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 276.
Bill Brown, “The Collecting Mania,” The University of Chicago Magazine, October 2001. http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0110/features/mania.html.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 162–64.
Mary Brigg, ed., The Journals of a Lancashire Weaver (The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1982), 11.
Robert FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839).
Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
Rebecca Steinitz, “The Illusion of Exchange: Gift, Trade, and Theft in the Nineteenth-Century British Voyage Narrative.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 7, nos. 3–4 (Winter 1996): 153–65.
Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomens Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 17–18.
Stuart Sherman insists upon the interpretive necessity of the diary’s material form in Telling Time. Several essays in Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff’s anthology Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Womens Diaries (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (1984; Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1988), xiii.
Henry Fox, The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840, ed. Abraham D. Kriegel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 25.
Ibid.; Cinthia Gannett, Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 114.
Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press-Oxford University Press, 1972), 1.
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© 2011 Rebecca Steinitz
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Steinitz, R. (2011). Arthur Munby, the Endless Diary, and the Promise of Space. In: Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339606_3
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