Life in the South. The Naples Journal of Marianne Talbot 1829-32

During the early years of the nineteenth century, Sir George Talbot was a well-known figure in the elite circles of London society. Then, in 1816, he and his two daughters set off for the Continent where they were to spend most of the ensuing sixteen years. During this period, his elder daughter Marianne (1788-1885) kept private journals. Published here is one single volume, possibly the only surviving one, which covers the final three years of the Talbots’ residence on the Continent.

This is not a carefully structured account kept dutifully day by day, but a series of entries kept at shorter or longer intervals, with a summary of events and encounters from a sequence of days often concertina-ed together, snippets of conversations, brief anecdotes, thoughts and reflections made by the writer about her life and circumstances, isolated statements and sometimes incomprehensible allusions. Yet remarkably, in a kaleidoscopic way, the often fragmented elements taken together coalesce into a remarkably vivid portrayal not merely of the British society living in Naples around 1830, but of the wider political, social and cultural world of the time.

A range of important, eccentric, and comic figures feature in its pages, including Sir Wiliam Gell, the person mainly responsible for bringing the discoveries at Pompeii to the attention of the British public, Stratford Canning and Robert Gordon, British negotiators on the independence of Greece, the Marquis of Hertford and his companion Lady Strachan, as rich as royalty and behaving accordingly, the diarist Charles Greville, the traveller James Morier newly famous for his novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, the sad figure of Sir Walter Scott making his slow, final journey to his homeland. The numerous anecdotes also provide an entertaining insight into the life of the times: the naval lieutenant helping his prospective bride escape from a nunnery, the daughter of a marquis who marries her courier, the gentleman who arranges for a Catholic priest to marry him to his betrothed against the wishes of the latter’s mother, the volcanic island which emerges out of the Mediterranean and on which a Royal Naval captain immediately plants a Union Jack.

Finally, though ‘through a glass darkly’, we glimpse something of the writer herself: her sad childhood, her tense relationship with father and sister, her love of reading, her wide circle of acquaintance, her perceptions of marriage and the role of women in marriage, and her concerns about her life, present and future. There are moments of amusement and sadness on almost every page.

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