Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by David Daiches
- One Literature and Politics
- Two The Political in Britain’s Two National Theatres
- Three Young Writers of the Thirties
- Four Koestler’s Koestler
- Five Hannah Arendt: Hedgehog or Fox?
- Six Beatrice Webb as English Diarist
- Seven Words
- Eight My Lse
- Nine Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
- Ten On the Difficulties of Writing Biography and of Orwell’s in Particular
- Eleven Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four As Satire
- Twelve Animal Farm For Schools
- Thirteen Orwell and English Socialism
- Fourteen On the Orwell Trail
- Fifteen Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
- Sixteen Horvath’s Tales From the Vienna Woods
- Seventeen Pinter’s No Man's Land
- Eighteen Polly By Gaslight
- Nineteen Edgar Catches Jenkins’ Ear at the Barbican
- Twenty Barrault at the Barbican
- Index
Six - Beatrice Webb as English Diarist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by David Daiches
- One Literature and Politics
- Two The Political in Britain’s Two National Theatres
- Three Young Writers of the Thirties
- Four Koestler’s Koestler
- Five Hannah Arendt: Hedgehog or Fox?
- Six Beatrice Webb as English Diarist
- Seven Words
- Eight My Lse
- Nine Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
- Ten On the Difficulties of Writing Biography and of Orwell’s in Particular
- Eleven Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four As Satire
- Twelve Animal Farm For Schools
- Thirteen Orwell and English Socialism
- Fourteen On the Orwell Trail
- Fifteen Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
- Sixteen Horvath’s Tales From the Vienna Woods
- Seventeen Pinter’s No Man's Land
- Eighteen Polly By Gaslight
- Nineteen Edgar Catches Jenkins’ Ear at the Barbican
- Twenty Barrault at the Barbican
- Index
Summary
Now that all four volumes of Beatrice Webb's diaries are out and can be read through at leisure and continually dipped into for pleasure, there can be no doubt that they are not merely a major source for modern British social and intellectual history but also show that Beatrice Webb must be numbered, however unexpectedly to some, among the great English diarists.
Sidney Webb, the socialist, dined here to meet the Booths. A remarkable little man with a huge head on a very tiny body, a breadth of forehead quite sufficient to account for the encyclopaedic character of his knowledge, a Jewish nose, prominent eyes and mouth, black hair, somewhat unkempt, spectacles and a most bourgeois black coat shiny with wear; regarded as a whole, somewhat between a London card and a German professor. To keep to essentials: his pronunciation is cockney, his H's are shaky, his attitudes by no means eloquent, with his thumbs fixed pugnaciously in a far from immaculate waistcoat, with his bulky head thrown back and his little body forward his struts even when he stands, delivering himself with extraordinary rapidity of thought and utterance and with and expression of inexhaustible self- complacency. But I like the man. There is a directness of speech, an open-mindedness, an imaginative warm-heartedness which should carry him far… (14 Feb 1890)
They cover an amazing time-scale of seventy years and she herself constantly reflects on time: her hopes for the future, memories of the past, wry and candid admissions that not all social change pleases her, and her fears that increasing bodily debility could spread to the mind; but the very last entry is a rational account of the ending of personal time. There are a few mundane passages, certainly, and the Mackenzies have sensibly printed little from their foreign travel world tours—out of her British environment she could be banal; but generally her profundity of observation,both of events and of people, and the mixture of light malice towards others and honest, even torturing self-criticism, makes this both an authentic and a great diary.
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- Essays on Politics and Literature , pp. 78 - 84Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020