This blog posts entries from the diaries of Thomas Turner, an eighteenth-century shopkeeper and parochial officer in the small English village of East Hoathly in Sussex. Turner chronicled his life in meticulous detail, from his mundane dining habits, to his propensity for getting drunk.
The text has been created from the transcription by Dean K Worcester completed in 1948. It consists of approximately 420, 000 words. The original of this transcript is held by Yale University Library in their manuscript and archive collections . In addition, a photocopy is held by the East Sussex Record Office at The Keep (ref: AMS 6532/1-5). The Worcester text is a fuller version than that edited by David Vaisey and initially published in 1984.1 However, this transcript is not a full and accurate version of the original diary. After the entry for August 13 1755 Worcester notes:
Hereafter omissions will be indicated by dots (… ). Money, food and Biblical texts, if not the subject of explanatory comments, will be omitted as too repetitive and bulky.2
He also adopts a number of editing conventions, such as expanding contractions of common words. As far as I am able, the text follows the Worcester transcription. The additions include the italicization of the title of a publication rather than the underling used by Worcester. Words not included in the Worcester transcription appear in square brackets. I am also beginning the process of adding explanatory footnotes.
The copyright of the text in this blog belongs to Louise Falcini and is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license)