Personal diaries can provide valuable insights into many topics of interest to urban historians, and the diaries transcribed in this volume are no exception. Anthony Hewitson was, variously, a compositor, journalist, editor, newspaper proprietor and author, based mainly in the town of Preston, Lancashire. He was born in Blackburn in 1836, and his first surviving diary begins in March 1865 when he was working as chief reporter on the Preston Guardian. His diaries continue until his death in 1912 and all the diaries, together with many of his other writings, are in the Lancashire Record Office (Preston). The volume reviewed here contains all his diaries and other personal writing from 1865 to 1887, with a second volume promised. Andrew Hobbs and his helpers have carefully transcribed the diaries, Hobbs has written a useful introduction to the life and work of Hewitson and the team have also assembled a full bibliography of his work, a family tree, a list of the books read by Hewitson, a glossary of technical and dialect terms and an explanatory list of all the people mentioned in the diary. The volume is very carefully referenced and provides a scholarly introduction to the writings of Hewitson.
In many respects, the Hewitson diaries are unremarkable. Like many other diaries, his entries provide a description of everyday activities, including his travel, work and family matters. He includes comments on politics and religion (partly related to his reporting activities, but also reflecting his own views), together with details of his domestic life. In common with many other diarists, Hewitson was not always consistent in his entries. There are quite long gaps in the diaries with 11 years completely missing from the series published here, either because a diary was not kept, or it has not survived. However, Hobbs argues persuasively that what is distinctive and important about these diaries is that they provide a detailed picture of the work of a prolific journalist working in a Lancashire town in the second half of the nineteenth century, where he saw and reported on numerous aspects of urban politics, religion and everyday life. They demonstrate both how he worked and how he reflected those events in his writings. Diary writing is not always compatible with a busy working and family life, so a run of diaries that covers most of the author’s adult life, and which provides a detailed account of his wide-ranging activities, provides a valuable insight to aspects of urban history which may otherwise remain hidden from view.
Hewitson was very hard working, often at his desk late into the night, though he did not neglect his family duties when work pressures allowed. His reporting activities took him all over north-west England, but to my mind his diaries give only limited insights into his actual working day, as his entries often said little more than ‘worked all day’. He did undertake some longer-distance travel during the course of the diary, sometimes entirely for leisure purposes, but often combining work and pleasure. For instance, in October 1887, he and his wife travelled to London to inspect and order Christmas cards for the stationery shop that he owned, and which was principally managed by his wife. However, while in London they also attended theatre performances most evenings and visited tourist locations during the daytime. He also travelled abroad, including a trip to the USA and Canada in 1883, a year for which no diary survives, though he lectured on the trip and wrote about it in a later publication. In August 1887, he took his wife and one daughter on a 10-day tour of Holland and Belgium, visiting Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels. His account of this trip, and his impressions of the cities he visited, are covered in some detail in the diary.
The team that worked on the diary manuscripts appear to have fully transcribed the diaries, including some sections that had been crossed out, but which remained legible. For me, this raises some ethical issues about whether material that was written but then (presumably) deliberately, partly, obscured, should actually be transcribed. I would probably not have included these entries. In conclusion, the transcription and publication of these diaries is a valuable contribution to the history of journalism, and provides useful commentary on some of the urban areas of north-west England in the second half of the nineteenth century. I suspect that few will read the book from cover to cover, but there is a good index, and the volume can be easily dipped into to extract information relevant to a particular purpose.
