Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 126

This volume brings together the diaries of two Quakers living in northern England in the late eighteenth century. The first is that of John Chipchase (1747–1816) who ran a school with an international reputation for teaching navigation in Stockton-on-Tees. The journal itself, housed in the library of Concordia University in Montreal, has until now been little known and difficult to access by scholars working in Britain. The second is the better-known diary of Elihu Robinson (1734–1809), an enterprising yeoman farmer from Cumberland, now in the possession of the Religious Society of Friends Library in London. Robert Tittler’s useful introduction summarizes the available biographical information about the two men, and in common with much scholarship on life-writing, explores how their faith shaped their outlook and their practice of diary keeping and how the practices of reading and letter writing contributed to cultures of knowledge in this period.

The weather, as the title of the volume suggests, was a major preoccupation of both diarists, though their approach to recording it and making sense of its significance is notably different. Chipchase had a social historian’s eye for the impact that meteorological phenomena had on the lives of individuals and communities and the meanings his neighbours ascribed to weather events. He is often concerned, for example, with the struggles of the labouring poor during heavy snowstorms, or the impact of flooding on local businesses. His entries consist not of daily notices but rather an episodic narrative of unusual or extreme events. In contrast, Robinson’s accounts are more systematic and data driven, listing weather conditions, readings of the thermometer and barometer, and the prices of farm produce in each entry, but he was less interested in interpreting or contextualizing this information in his record. As a farmer, however, the weather had a direct daily effect on his livelihood, and his diary is a meticulous record of how one farm was managed in relation to unpredictable environmental conditions.

Chipchase was a keen editor of his own writing, adding notes and addenda to earlier entries, and elements of his diary resemble a commonplace book or local history more than an ego document. The recto pages of both the original and this transcribed edition contain his diary in chronological order, while on the verso pages facing these Chipchase included corroborating or contrasting accounts from newspapers or notes about earlier occurrences of similar phenomena. For example, opposite an entry about damage done to a neighbour’s house by lightning in 1783, Chipchase added notes about the death of a woman struck by lightning in 1724 and a barn fire caused by lightning in 1751. Chipchase also incorporated poems and literary quotes in his writing, copied accounts of local and national food prices, and transcribed the contents of another diary in his possession, that of Stockton parish clerk Robert Stock (c.1650–1719), onto some of the verso pages of his own journal, adding to the layers of local knowledge contained in this volume. The result is a fascinating intertextual web, but it can be difficult for the reader to come to grips with in the first instance. A parallel structure has been retained so that recto and verso can be compared side by side, but the result sometimes includes awkwardly placed jumps to successive pages and cumbersome gaps in the text. Tittler’s footnotes and note on editorial method offer some guidance, so these are critical to comprehension rather than a bibliographical addition.

Chipchase was also a keen amateur participant in the science of astronomy, an interest that may have grown out of his professional expertise in navigation, and his diary has much to offer scholars interested in engagement with Enlightenment ideas and the Scientific Revolution among groups beyond the elite. He frequently noted his own observations of the night sky and collated these with reports of notable occurrences both around his locality and further afield. Among other subjects, Chipchase recorded the appearance of the Aurora Borealis over his home in 1783 and 1814 and included extracts from newspaper reports charting the extent of its visibility. Imaginative speculation about the phenomenon’s similarity to the view ‘which the Ring of Saturn must exhibit to the Inhabitants of that planet’ is interspersed with precise scientific measurements from the Macfarlane Observatory in Glasgow. Observations of meteors are a recurring feature, with numerous accounts in particular of the Leonid meteor show which caused an international sensation in 1799, as are atmospheric optical phenomena like lunar coronae and a parhelion (sundogs, in modern parlance).

Robinson’s is a denser text with a tendency toward listing events and activities rather than reflecting on them, though he becomes more animated about social and political upheaval in the latter two of his three diary volumes. The dearth and hardship of the late 1790s, when several poor harvests and ongoing war with France compounded the strain on domestic food supply, shapes both diaries in this period. Chipchase recorded an account of food riots in Stockton in 1795 which included unrest by local women on market day and an attack on the local miller. His response to the need to alleviate food shortage was political and practical, suggesting alternative recipes for feeding the poor and recording the deliberations of the bishop of Durham and local elites about the best way to provide additional relief. Robinson, by contrast, tended to reiterate his faith in God to provide deliverance.

Overall, one major contribution of this volume is the detailed local perspective on the volatile decades at the close of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, in addition to adding to the corpus of published personal narratives of the northern middling sort in general, historians of agriculture, scientific inquiry and the environment, in particular, will find much of interest in both diaries.