Wednesday 30 July: The wine in the photograph is our prize for the succession of book launches for The World’s Great Question we’ve participated in – the VRS has done us proud in many many ways and we’re truly grateful to them. So glasses raised to Howard Phillips, Nick Southey, Elizabeth van Heyningen, Cora Ovens and all the others.

Today’s blog is about something a world away. It is the small interesting puzzle of ‘is it about time’ or about something different which leads to the many slippages between letters, journals and reminiscences in things written, not just by Mary Moffat and her daughter Bessie Price but many other people too. For instance:

On arrival from Duckinfield near Manchester to Cape Town to marry Robert Moffat, Mary-soon-to-be-Moffat dispatched a journal to her parents. Well, it’s called a travel journal but it starts as a letter, has only few internal dates but contains many of the features of letterness and few of the strong diurnal features of journal-writing. Also, some of her letters take much more of the form of reminiscences because they lack personal address and diurnality and are marked by temporal reflectiveness. And as for Mary Moffat, so too there are similar overlaps and border crossings for Bessie Price too.

Bessie Price’s letters frequently, if not invariably, have multiple dates and so take on some features of journals. Also her journals are often addressed to people and they are also responsive to opportunities to send them to people, and in this share features with letters. And Bessie’s actual reminiscences, unlike her mother’s efforts in this line, were written far down the time-line in shaky handwriting and raise the stretchy character of time and its passing, and that long time introduces greater differences from short time and its passing. Ah, but differences of what kinds and to what effects?

About time, then, and so, what is the title of this blog alluding to more exactly? What these genre border crossings raise is the possibility that it was the different writers’ perceptions of time that made the difference to the kind of crossings involved. However, what also comes across is that differences in form or genre didn’t perhaps matter that much to them, but what did were the communicative purposes in hand. And so, for instance, Bessie Price had few opportunities for posting letters and so wrote compendiums, and Mary Moffat was not perhaps a reflective woman but did feel a sense of connection with friends and family elsewhere and always had to reckon with weeks, sometimes months, before letters could be sent, let alone arrive.

Last updated: 30 July 2014