As we begin 2014 and many of us resolve to keep a diary, here are 10 of the best of the form for inspiration
I have spent much of the last couple of years leafing through various volumes of diaries as the co-compiler, with the writer Nick Rennison, of A London Year, a day-by-day anthology of journals, diaries and letters covering 600 years of life in capital. But it was not until the opening decades of the 19th century that the stationer John Letts first began selling a yearly almanac from his shop at the Royal Exchange, then home to numerous booksellers and coffee houses and an area previously haunted by Samuel Pepys. The Letts diary was an immediate success, attracting such devoted users as William Makepeace Thackeray – who favoured the "three shillings cloth boards" No 12 model – and continues to be published in a multitude of formats to this day. As another year begins and many of us resolve to keep a diary, here is my list of top 10 literary diarists. Some are more familiar than others, and some of the most famous are probably noticeably absent, but all writers' volumes exemplify the best of the form.
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
The most famous of all English diarists, Samuel Pepys, began his diary in 1660, just before he secured a position as clerk of the acts to the navy board, and brought it to an end nine years later because he believed (mistakenly) that his eyesight was deteriorating so badly that he risked blindness. His contemporary, John Evelyn, occasionally has the edge on the big historical events – Evelyn's account of the the Great Fire of London, for example, is more descriptive – but Pepys feels a truer creature of the restoration era, relishing the capital's bawdy taverns, coffee houses and reopened playhouses.
WNP Barbellion (1889-1919)
One of the most compelling diarists of the 20th century, Bruce Frederick Cummings took the elaborate nom de plume of Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion when he published The Journal of a Disappointed Man just six months before his early death at 30 from multiple sclerosis in 1919. He worked at the Natural History Museum until the progress of his illness made it impossible. The Journal moves, entertainingly, and increasingly movingly, from his early enthusiasm for science and the anxieties he feels as a provincial-born innocent in London through to his unhappy love affairs and his grim decline into ill health and the approach of death. Long out of print, The Journal of a Disappointed Man has recently been reissued in a smart new edition by Little Toller Books.
Fred Bason (1908-73)
Fred Bason was born in Walworth and became a dealer in secondhand books when he was still in his teens. Through bookselling – and as something of a celeb hound – he came to know authors such as Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham and James Agate, and he ran a bookshop in Camberwell throughout the 1930s. His own writings included hundreds of articles for the press, BBC talks, books on theatregoing and collecting cigarette cards. Four volumes of diaries, including one volume edited by Noel Coward, were published in the 1950s. They play heavily on his salt-of-the-earth persona, but they are packed with fascinating period detail. One especially memorable entry finds the diarist attending a screening of Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer – the world's first talking picture. Bason is unimpressed with this new cinematic innovation, and merely grumbles about the noise before recording that Jolson "sings awful".
Joan Wyndham (1921–2007)
A member of the bohemian world of wartime Fitzrovia when she was a young woman, Joan Wyndham's two volumes of diaries, Love Lessons and Love Is Blue, were not published until the 1980s. Memorably described in one newspaper as "a latter-day Pepys in camiknickers", Wyndham writes with wit, candour and exuberance of her love affairs, London during the Blitz and her encounters with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Julian Maclaren-Ross.
Alan Bennett (born 1934)
Alan Bennett, who first came to prominence with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in their satirical revue Beyond the Fringe in 1960, has been publishing extracts from his diaries in the London Review of Books since the 1980s. Like his public persona and much-loved and keenly observed dramas, Bennett's diaries are frequently much more political and delightfully waspish than is generally assumed.
Dickon Edwards (born 1971)
In his own words, Dickon Edwards is a "writer, dysfunctional dandy, flâneur, lyricist, DJ, dilettante, boulevardier, valetudinarian, imbiber". Founding member of the "new romo" band Orlando and indie outfit Fosca, the ever-resplendently suited and bedsit-dwelling Edwards is perhaps the closest thing to a Quentin Crisp of the internet era. He has kept a continuous online diary since 1997.
James Boswell (1740-95)
Biographer of Dr Johnson, James Boswell's own diaries didn't come to light until the 1920s, and his London Journal was first published in 1950. Covering the years 1762-3, just before and after his original meeting with Johnson, we meet Boswell as a boozing, womanising young man about town.
Hallie Eustace Miles (c1870–c1940)
The daughter of the rector of St Clement Danes, Hallie Killick married the sportsman and writer Eustace Hamilton Miles in 1906. Together with her husband, she ran a vegetarian restaurant and pioneering health food centre, and counted AC Benson, among other literary luminaries, as customers and friends. As the centenary of the first world war approaches, her diary of their life during the first Blitz, originally published in 1930, is definitely worth seeking out.
Elizabeth Smart (1913-86)
A Canadian poet and novelist, Elizabeth Smart is best known for her work of prose poetry entitled By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, first published in 1945. The book, once described by Angela Carter as "like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning", was inspired by her long, tormented love affair with the English poet George Barker. Her equally impressive journals were published in two volumes in 1987 and 1997.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
The leading figure in the Bloomsbury movement, Virginia Woolf kept diaries for much of her life. A multi-volume selection, beginning in 1915 and ending with her suicide by drowning in 1941, was edited by her nephew, Quentin Bell, and his wife, and published in the 1970s and 1980s. The diaries provide a window on life among the literary elite in the interwar years.
• A London Year: 365 Days of City Life in Diaries, Journals and Letters compiled by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison is published by Francis Lincoln. Buy it for £20 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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