And all these themes are regularly commented upon in the Journals, as Baltiboys played its part in the steady improvement of the neighbourhood around the market town of Blessington in those pre-Famine years.
This is a neighbourhood, moreover, that comes alive through Elizabeth Smith’s descriptions of all classes of society. We meet the stately Marquis of Downshire, one of the greatest landowners in Ireland, whose well-run estates contrast so much with the feckless mismanagement of that broken-down gambler, the Earl of Milltown; the gossiping Dr George Robinson, brother to the Agent, whose life is inter-twined with that of the Smith family right down to Annie’s marriage in 1850 with which this volume concludes. (He took her marriage rather badly.) At a humbler level, each and every person living and working at Baltiboys, (whose situation and prospects were analysed in the Catalogue Raisonée the indefatiguable landlord’s wife produced at the beginning of that terrible year 1847), can be followed through these pages. There is a wealth of characters to illuminate the detailed recreation of family and estate life at Baltiboys, the range of agricultural change and improvement, and the life led by all groups of society around them. And as David Thomson wrote in his Introduction, all this is achieved by the direct and forceful writing of a character with powerful opinions and an intelligent mind.
My delight is in the vigour of her mind; her wit, the immediacy of her narrative and descriptive style which forwards her life and times to us in a mixture of asperity and warmth of heart, her ventures into practical experiment in education and farming methods.
But, in addition to adding to the Highland lady’s reputation as an extremely distinguished diarist, these writings from the 1840s have an importance over and above the literary. They are a significant addition to a revised picture of some parts of Irish landlordism, which shows how some landed proprietors, while undoubtedly conscious of their rights, still tried conscientiously to carry out their duties. This contrasts with the report of the Devon Commission, for example, which was established in 1843 to inquire into Irish land tenure, which stressed that the evils of the system were wellnigh universal.*
It was three months after the Smiths returned from their retrenching exercise in France that the ravages of phytophthora infestans, the potato blight, appeared in the Baltiboys area. The Journals provide a day-to-day account of how this well-endowed and comparatively prosperous eastern part of Ireland coped with the challenges of the disaster, and how it reacted to the despairing and sometimes belated efforts of the governments of Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell to introduce measures that would relieve the tragic consequences of failure in the potato crops.
This edition of the Irish diaries kept by the Highland lady during the 1840s is a little more than 200,000 words long, perhaps a quarter of all she wrote. Customary editorial practices, and hopefully common sense, were adhered to so that Elizabeth Smith’s individual voice emerges here as clearly and as forcefully as Elizabeth Grant’s does from the Memoirs. Sometimes the same story is told in both (after all, for example, she read Lockhart’s biography of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, in 1840 and commented upon it in her Journal long before she mentioned it again in the Memoirs). But the best observations are always good enough to bear a second reading. She wrote in one continuous flow, so modern notions of paragraphing have been introduced, but her spelling has been retained (‘philippick’, ‘atchieved’, ‘burthen’, ‘plaister’, ‘steeple chacing’) except in the case of some placenames (‘Drumewachta’ has a certain charm but it may not be recognised as Drumochter). She consistently wrote ‘Blesington’ and the ‘Milltowns’.
Elizabeth Grant arrived as Elizabeth Smith to her new responsibilities at Baltiboys with a wealth of Scottish experience behind her, and the two extended spells she spent in Scotland in the summers of 1842 (when she wrote her eyewitness account of Queen Victoria’s visit) and 1846 (when she returned to her beloved Rothiemurchus) show how she treasured her roots. But she also became fiercely attached to her new loyalties and it is interesting that her sister’s 1831 diary should contain this perceptive comment:
I don’t know how it is, but whenever I have been parted from Eliza for more than a month, she has, at our first meeting again, appeared more altered than most people do in the course of years. I believe it is from her extraordinary propensity for falling into the ways, the habits, customs, manners and opinions even, of those she lives with; a faculty of extreme value to the possessor, as it is sure to endear her to everybody by whom she is surrounded, and fits her for every possible change of place or condition.
A little later she makes a final remark: ‘They have made an Irishwoman of you now, and may they know the value of the daughter they adopted into their Country’ – a fitting summation of the Highland lady and the fascination of her Irish Journals.
Finally, should something of the charm, irritation, intelligence and importance of this marvellous writer have succeeded in being conveyed to her readers, much of the credit must go to my co-editor Patricia Pelly, one of the Highland lady’s great-great-grand-daughters, whose family knowledge and committed interest have played an enormous part in preparing this version of her distinguished ancestor’s diaries for publication.
Andrew Tod
* Edited by her niece, Lady Strachey, they were first published in 1898 and a further revised version was produced by Angus Davidson. The complete text appeared for the first time in 1988, edited by Andrew Tod for the Canongate Classics.
* Ninette de Valois Come Dance With Me (London, 1957).
*For more on the historical background see the magisterial New History of Ireland, Volume V, Ireland under the Union I, 1801–1870, hereafter NH of I edited by W. E. Vaughan (O.U.P., 1989).
Author’s Note
The decision to publish a fourth impression of the Memoirs gives me the opportunity to add a few words to earlier introductions, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of what I called “the first complete and authentic edition” of one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century Scottish literature. This has been in print most of the years since Lady Strachey’s edition of 1898, and is still appreciated by scholars and the less academic reading public, which recognises and values Elizabeth Grant’s well-written recollections of her life and times.
This third impression of the first volume from the extracts of the journals the Highland Lady kept in the 1840s gives me the opportunity to emphasise that the twenty one years since its publication have not diminished the charm of her writing, or its significance as to how the ravages of the Famine years affected her part of Ireland. Extracts appear in anthologies, and she is trusted as a reliable witness by, for example, the plethora of books produced during the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this disaster.
Recently unearthed letters from the Doune