My 19th-century blogger, Frances Williams Wynn, is today reporting on on the death of William IV and the accession of Queen Victoria. She’s displaying her typical bluntness about the king’s sins, but thinks he had a good death:

It is very interesting to compare the appearance of the town now, with that which it wore after the death of George IV.; then few, very few, thought it necessary to assume the mask of grief; now one feeling seems to actuate the nation ; party is forgotten, and all mourn, if not so deeply, quite as unanimously, as they did for Princess Charlotte. After a few days of short unsatisfactory bulletins, a prayer for the King was ordered, and sent with pitiful economy by the two-penny post, so that, though the prayer appeared in every newspaper of Saturday evening, it was received by hardly any of the London clergy in time for morning service on Sunday. In our chapel, prayers were desired for Our Sovereign Lord the King, lying dangerously ill; and these introduced in the Litany just as they would have been for the poorest of his subjects!

I love that line about the two-penny post…

My 19th-century “blogger” is today displaying a fine sceptical mind on the claim that a sign of “great men” is their ability to sleep under even massive pressure. (Her Victorian male editor, however, has swallowed the myth wholesale, in his gushing collection of notes.)

Miss Williams Wynn discusses the tales of Pitt (the Younger, I think) and the Duke of Wellington apparently being able to fall asleep under the greatest of pressures. She says:

This is called a proof of greatness of mind. I am more inclined to believe that youth, health, and fatigue produce a sort of absolute necessity for sleep, which no mental excitation can remove; and I am confirmed in this opinion by hearing that, in his after days, and especially in his last illness, poor Pitt never could sleep. The Duke of Wellington is always brought forward as the most extraordinary instance of a person who, under the most violent excitations of his eventful career, could always, and at all hours of the day or night, get sleep during any repose, however short it might be, that circumstances allowed. Perhaps great bodily fatigue enabled him to find ‘ tired Nature’s sweet restorer.’ I wonder whether he is a good sleeper now.

In the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth on Thursday afternoon – a distinctly 1930s grand edifice standing on the top of a steep! hill just outside what must have been the town boundary when it was built. It is recently restored, to within an inch of its life, down to wood veneer lockers matching the original fittings. (Perhaps a Welsh Assembly spending prioirty, not that I’m complaining.) And the sheep grazing in the field in front are a nice touch – a bit different to the Euston Road at the British Library.

It is slightly disconcerting to be here, in the UK, in foreign language territory – the signs have Welsh first, so I have to remember to look at the secondary text to make any sense of them. Everyone is also speaking Welsh – if, perhaps, you get the feeling, a trifle self-consciously, as a political statement rather than a natural habit. Down in the town, I will find, everyone speaks English, in the conversations you overhear.

The ones speaking so that I can pick out the sound of each word, if none of the meanings, are the ones working hardest at it. Previous exposure to Welsh has shown me that spoken by a real native speaker, it is just one long flow of apparently unbroken syllables. (When I rang the tourist office and was offered the name of a B&B I had to ask to have it spelt out before I had any hope of converting the sounds into something I could pronounce.)

One of the purposes for being here is to check out the original papers of the Lady of Quality, Miss Francis Williams Wynn, to see just how much the Victoian male editor bowdlerised them.

So I have two of them sitting before me as I write, two small leather-bound notebooks. One, NLW MS 2775A, is very simply bound, and a flowing FWW has been scratched into the front of it. The other, 2776B, has a library binding, moderately ornamented brown with a gold strip around the front and decoration along the spine.

Miss Williams Wynn’s hand is flowing, open, expansive, and immediately accessible. (Whew – makes life so much easier.) She’s hand-numbered each page (probably in one run after the text was written, judging by the way in places the text interferes with the numbers) and written her own index at the front – helping confirm the thought that this is more commonplace book than diary.

“B” has written in the front “F. William Wynn July 1824.” A has marbled front page with the binding and goes straight into theh unheade d index. In pencil, with “A. Haywood”, her editor, at the top.

Thrust into “B” is a tiny note, the paper no more than 10cm by 5cm, in a very small hand, reading.

My dear Miss Wynn,
I return you your book with many thanks for the pleasure which I have derived from its perusal. How much more interesting does Lady Nithsdale story become when we reads it as it was written, & not moderized. into a fashionable Novel.
I trust you will receive this in time before you start wishing you a bon voyage ????? sincerely
M. Fortescue Harriet (?)
Saturday morning

My 19th-century blogger, Miss Frances William Wynn, is today tackling one of the great political/society puzzles of the 18th century – who is Junius? Not that she finds an answer, or even has her own theory, but she has obviously done a lot of research on the subject.

Wikipedia would appear to do a good job of outlining the tale, and also of setting out the candidates.

Interesting that, one way or another, women seem to play such a prominent role in either shielding, or possibly revealing, the culprit.

That’s today’s topic for my 19th-century retro-blogger, Miss Frances Williams Wynn. OK, it is more than a little un-PC, and the anti-Catholic, Orientalist predjudices are clear, but you couldn’t accuse of being a dull account:

…ladies living in their bed-rooms, or in their kitchens — every wife with one lover at least, who passes the life-long evening puffing his cigar at her feet — a lady receiving company with six dragoons sitting on the bed in which she was talking of nothing but house-hold affairs—every woman, even those of seventy, coiffee en cheveux, with one flower stuck perhaps in the grey locks…

Not too sure about the fireflies – strikes me as something someone did once that grew and grew as a tale.