Chapter Text
In 1860, Mr J. Walker, an author, artist, and biologist, spent a summer in Cumberland—now Northern Cumbria—to study and illustrate the local plants and wildlife for his Illustrated Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the Coast of Cumberland, which was published the following year. During his stay, he composed a diary.
The diary is a slim book bound in blue linen. The beginning and end dates—the diary spans late May to mid-August—are stamped in faint gold letters on the cover. Walker was an avid diarist and this volume is but one in a series (see the Final Entry), though it is the only extant one (see ‘Rediscovery’ below). This is very evident in the abrupt, in medias res beginning. Clearly, Walker’s previous diary was full, and he began the new one where the other left off—so close, in fact, that one should probably be thankful he did not begin mid-sentence.
Written in black ink, the diary additionally contains a handful of illustrations. These range from rough ink sketches of landscapes to fully coloured and detailed portraits; the highlight of the whole volume is a full-body portrait, done in gouache and covering an entire page, of the merman he made the acquaintance of during his stay and frequently visited.
Historical Context.
Diaries.
In their mode of writing, content, immediacy, and lack of an audience—indeed, the vast majority of diaries are kept private at least during the writer’s lifetime—diaries take a unique space in recollective writing. They record the writer’s daily experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Diaries from the past can provide the historian with vital details into the daily life of the past like no other document can.
A distinction is made on occasion between a journal and a diary. While both are written on a daily or near-daily basis, recording events as they occur, a journal commonly refers to an objective record of events, such as a scientist’s field journal, which may be written with the expectation that it will later be made public in some form or another. Diaries, by contrast, are private recollections that include the writer’s feelings, views, and sometimes even intimate details. In effect, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between a diary and a journal—the present object of study, for example, has features of both.
It can be assumed that a large number of all diaries ever written, if not the vast majority, have been destroyed, either by the author, their descendants, or mere time. As unique, personal, and often intimate records of another person’s life, family members may be reluctant to let their loved one’s diaries enter the public eye, while diary writers themselves may destroy their diaries for fear of scandal or incriminating themselves. J. Walker was certainly conscious of this, and by encoding portions of his diary, took steps to protect himself (see below).
Science.
The modern system of biological taxonomy was largely established by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). His system introduced rank-based classification of organisms—though it has been updated over time—and his naming system of genus species (subspecies) is still adhered to.[1] J. Walker himself follows this system when he coins the name homo sapiens aquatilis in an article for the 1861 edition of the Annals and Magazine of Aquatic Biology. Subsequent scientists have put forward different taxonomies for the merfolk, but following taxonomic conventions, Walker’s nomenclature, as the first to have been published in a scientific paper, is the one that is in use.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. To call this work groundbreaking would be an understatement. It threw the entire Christian worldview into question. Some opposition also came from the ranks of science, but many recognised it as the pioneering work it was. It was also widely popular with a lay audience, and published internationally.[2] Walker certainly read it and adopted the theory proposed; in the abovementioned piece for the Annals and Magazine of Aquatic Biology (of which a draft is included in this diary), he refers to Darwin’s theory.
Biography.
Little is known of J. Walker—not even his first name is recorded—aside from a few key biographical dates. He was born on 12 August 1825. From 1845, he attended Frinton-Smith University in London, studying biology. It is not known how he learned art as there is no record of him receiving a formal education in this subject; this does not necessarily mean he was self-taught, however. He taught at his Alma Mater from 1853-1856, but stopped for unclear reasons—the speculative mind immediately jumps to scandal (Walker was gay, see below), but it might also be due to his chronic illness (see below), or simply because his contract ended or he found the job unsatisfactory or the pay too abysmal. In 1859, Walker entered a contract with Peters & Cobbler, a small, now defunct publisher based in Manchester specialising in scientific illustrations, to produce the aforementioned Illustrated Guide. He arrived in Cumberland at the house of an old friend, Maurice, whom he had met as a student at university, in late May 1860, when this diary begins.
During the following decade, Walker established himself through a series of treatises and articles, many though not all of which have survived long enough to be digitised, as the leading authority on Homo sapiens aquatilis. It is clear from his scientific writing that he returned frequently throughout the 1860’s to Cumbria to further study Homo sapiens aquatilis. His star continued to rise until his work was—one must call a spade a spade—hijacked by more recognised and renowned scientists such as Reginald Fortescue-Mills, Henry James Matheson, and Ferdinando del Mar. These other scientists had the means to travel and study Homo sapiens aquatilis all over the world, often writing about their travels to great critical and public acclaim, pushing Walker further and further into the margins.
Walker subsequently fades from the historical record. The last unambiguous reference to him is from 1874, when he is mentioned as an editor and peer reviewer for the now defunct Cumbrian Journal of Marine Biology. There is a headstone of a J. Walker, 1825-1898, in St Andrew’s churchyard, in the parish where he spent the summer of 1860. If this really is the same J. Walker—and there are a few contemporary Johns, Josephs, and James Walkers—it might suggest that he settled down in Cumbria.
Walker had some form of chronic illness or health condition that kept him home- and occasionally bedbound for two to five days once or twice a month. He himself did not know what condition it was and had, at the time of the diary, resigned himself to it. The symptoms he most frequently describes are muscle and/or joint pain, headaches, fatigue, and occasionally fever. The symptoms are vague and broad enough to be congruent with a number of chronic health conditions and a diagnosis is therefore impossible. By the time of the diary, he had lived with the condition for a number of years. He self-medicated—atypically aware of the negative side effects and therefore cautious—with laudanum.
Furthermore, Walker was gay. While the term is anachronistic, it can and should be retroactively applied to him:[3] Walker never married, had sex exclusively with men, and at one point in the diary describes himself as ‘incapable of loving a woman’ (see the second entry for 10 June). This diary firmly rebuffs the myth of the sexually repressed, prudish Victorian. While encrypted out of necessity—sex between men was illegal[4]—the passages in which Walker records his sexual encounters are pornographic in their detail. If his record of the conversations he had with his sexual partner is to be believed—perhaps they were embellished in hindsight; almost certainly they are not verbatim reproductions—he was frank and blunt in communicating his sexual needs and desires, with a specialised, uneuphemistic vocabulary.
Textual Issues.
Without a doubt only ever meant for his own eyes, Walker’s style is self-referential and occasionally obscure. His reticence in regards to names is especially frustrating; the only person to ever be referred to by name is his friend and host, Maurice, and even here, it is unclear whether this is the man’s first or last name.
The text of the diary is reproduced as faithfully as possible, with small concessions. Walker underlined words for emphasis; this is rendered as italics in this edition. Passages that were formerly encrypted are marked by curly brackets: {}. Spelling errors are silently corrected. Occasional ellipses such as copula deletions are similarly rectified.
The code that Mr Walker used to encipher his more risqué passages is a Vignère cipher (see entry for 10 June), thought in Walker’s time to be unbreakable.[5]With the Vignère cipher, a text is encoded using a different Caesar cipher for each letter of the text. This renders it very easy to implement, but difficult to crack. First described in 1553, it was in use for centuries. The cipher was first broken in 1854, but it was not until 1863 that a method for decryption was made public.
The key Walker uses differs for each passage, and is the last three words that are preceded by a punctuation mark in the unencrypted passage before. For example, the key to the encrypted passage for the second entry of the 10th of June is went to dinner. Walker mentions that he composes the plain text of his diary on separate papers and transcribes the encrypted passage into his diary. Afterwards, he destroyed the plaintext.
Discovery.
I discovered this diary by chance at a yard sale in a shoebox of books selling for fifty pence each or three pounds for the whole lot. I paid three pounds but only fully grasped the kind of discovery I had made when unpacking at home. The moment I understood that what I held in my hands was an authentic Victorian diary, I contacted the yard sale proprietors again. It appears that Walker was a distant relative, a few branches sideways up in the family tree. But all my other inquiries were disappointed. They knew nothing about Walker aside from his name. As to the other diary volumes, this is the only one they can attest to; they assume it survived this long and was not discarded because of the pretty pictures inside.
Ellen Baker
Explanatory Notes.
[1] For a comprehensive view on taxonomy, including an excellent and comprehensive chapter on the history of taxonomy, see Flanagan, An Introduction to Linnaean Taxonomy.
[2] For a detailed analysis of the effect On the Origin of Species had on nearly every part of life, see Whitman, The Book that Shook the World: Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ and its Aftershocks
[3] For an excellent discussion on this topic, see Williams, “Don’t Say Gay? On the Cautious Use of Anachronistic Sexual Identity Terms ” in Journal of Historical Queer Studies, Vol. 5, no. 8, pp. 10-21.
[4] ‘Buggery,’ a term that at this point in history was defined as only including anal sex but that was broadly understood to mean any kind of sex between men, was a capital offence until 1861, though the last execution occurred in 1835. After 1861, the punishment was imprisonment. While the law only specifically outlawed ‘buggery’ in itself, any homoerotic acts could be persecuted as ‘attempts’ to commit the felony. See Kincaid and Parker, Homosexuality and the Law, pp. 130-36.
[5] For more information, see Turner, Frghv and Dwdrffg: A Brief History of Encryption.