LHMP #564f Orr 2006 A Sojourn in Paris Chapter One Anne’s Texts: Writing the Paris Sojourn 1824-25; Anne’s Journal Volume

As an illustration of how topics were handled, this section opens with “this treadmill business.” As part of her general curiosity about the world, and based on a recommendation by a friend, Lister decided to view and try out the penal treadmill at Clerkenwell prison. Public reaction to this event haunted her for some time. Evidently her proposed visit was so out of line for gender and class expectations of the time that not only was she required to get special permission from the prison magistrates, but the event was considered noteworthy and peculiar enough to be reported in London newspapers, and also the paper aimed at English ex-pats in Paris, where she was next heading. So she not only arrived in Paris to find gossip waiting for her, but she agonized over the possibility that the story would make it to Halifax.

In two journal entries, Lister notes having discussed the event with Mrs. Barlow and with her landlady Madame de Boyve. A connection is made between the public reaction to the treadmill event and reactions to Lister’s display of personal style and manners. While Lister regularly veered outside normative behavior, she disliked being viewed as straying outside class boundaries.

The treadmill incident appears in Lister’s texts in multiple ways, reflecting her various textual strategies. Most of her journal entries about it are in crypt hand, where she is exploring how she felt and reacted. But the journal used plain hand (as does her correspondence) to defend and explain her actions. Crypt hand was for internal processing, plain hand was for constructing a public representation of the event. Thus this one topic (and one not directly related to the more fraught issues of romance and sex) illustrates that the interplay of journal and letters, encryption and not, is more complicated than “crypt hand is for sex.”

This section concludes by laying out the contents of the chapter: an analysis of the format and contents of the journal, a similar analysis of letters, and an exploration of how the two are interconnected.

Anne’s Journal Volume

This section analyzes the nature of Lister’s journal and its contents, more in a structural sense than a narrative sense (which will be covered later).

She wrote a journal entry for every day of the Paris stay although, as will be discussed later, some entries were written up retrospectively. The physical volume that includes the Paris trip begins a month and a half before she traveled and continues for four months after her return to England, with about 2/3 covering Paris.

The physical specifications of the journal are described. The pages were blank and unlined, meaning that any formatting of the text was entirely by Lister’s choices. In addition to the daily entries, the journal contains three other types of content: a summary of letters received and sent, an index of books read, and an index to the journal entries that included brief summaries of their content and a number of symbols used to highlight content of particular interest. Orr notes that while previous researchers have undoubtedly used these indexes, they have not previously been analyzed for content.

The summary of letters comes first. Material from the letters was sometimes recorded in daily journal entries but would not then be included in the journal entry index, thus keeping structural separation between the two indexes.

[Note: I may have missed it – or the information may come later – but I don’t see a reference to whether Lister allocated a certain number of blank pages to the correspondence index before beginning the daily journal.]

Next in the volume come the daily entries. The index to the daily entries appears in the back of the volume with the book turned upside down so that the text progresses in standard fashion from the cover inward. (In theory, the volume would be full when the daily entries and the index met in the middle, but in actual fact a section of unused pages was left.)

Although Lister noted at one point that the index would be useful “should I ever publish” and although she used it when rereading older material, she never did create any sort of comprehensive or retrospective summary of her life and experiences.

The literary index, also located in the back of the volume, was written almost entirely in plain hand, one exception being a 16th century book of erotic poetry. The daily index used a mixture of crypt and plain hand. In general the writing mode in the index matched that in the entries, but there were exceptions.

The length of the entries and index notes was variable due to several factors. During the courtship of Mrs. Barlow, entries increased in length due to the amount of description and analysis Lister devoted to this topic. During particularly busy times not related to her romances, the entries might be relatively short, such as during her initial days in Paris, or when preparing to move or travel.

The journal index not only summarized key topics but signaled degrees of interest, especially using two symbols. The “cross” symbol (+) flagged sexual events. Within the journal entries it often indicated a session of masturbation, linked to the specific time of day and context. While text might describe this as “incurring a cross” a plus sign would be placed in the page margin to flag that content.

But the plus sign was not limited to recording masturbation. It also occurs in conjunction with references to reading sexually stimulating material. In all cases, a plus sign in the journal entry would be echoed by one in the relevant index, whether of the daily entries or literature.

A different symbol, the section mark § (also known as a silcrow), was used to flag content of particular interest. This was used in sets of 1 to 3 symbols appearing in both the journal entry and its index entry. A single mark was most common. A double mark was somewhat less frequent and marked topics that Lister might want to review in the future. The rare triple mark indicated experiences of intense emotion, whether positive or negative. There is a discussion providing examples of the types of content that each might appear with. There is a correlation between the number of markers and the amount of crypt hand in the associated passages.

The next part of the section describes in detail changes in the length of journal entries and the use of crypt hand relative to the events in Lister’s life. Factors that might result in postponing the writing up of entries are also considered. In some cases, an entry might note an event that interrupted the writing process, describing it in a footnote.

A separate writing practice enabled these delayed write ups to retain their accuracy and detail. Lister wrote up “memoranda” on slips kept in a “pocket casebook” kept close. These would record the details in real time that would be expanded in later journal entries. They might also be used for drafting entries or letters when particular care in composition was desired. [Note: possibly these memoranda were discarded after being written up in a more permanent form.]

[Aside: Completely unrelated to Lister, her practice here reminds me of a similar one my great-great-grandfather describes in the context of his Civil War diaries and letters from the 1860s. He would write up daily memoranda that would later be the basis for more detailed letters to family. But in his case the memoranda were written up in a notebook, which he would then mail home when it was full, and not on discardable slips of paper.]

Lister’s purpose in creating such a detailed record of her life is alluded to in an entry from 1821.

“By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past and present and thus to cheer and edify the future.”

The section concludes with a summary of the types of topics that Lister recorded in her journals.