6953 - Diary of Young Lady of Fashion

BACKGROUND TO THE PUBLICATION OF

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG LADY OF FASHION 1764 - 65

BY MAGDALEN KING-HALL

(by her son Richard Perceval Maxwell)

On Friday June 4^th 1926 both the Daily Express of London and New York Times devoted a full column of their front page to an interview with a young 21 year old authoress. In the Daily Express the headline was “CLEVEREST HOAX OF THE CENTURY”. In the New York Times it read “ GIRL TRICKS THE WORLD WITH LITERARY HOAX, INTENDED AS JOKE”.

The story which led to these headlines had started the previous autumn when The Sunday Times had published a long and enthusiastic review of a book entitled THE DIARY OF A YOUNG LADY OF FASHION 1764-65. This diary described the experiences of a young Anglo-Irish girl, Cleone Knox, while on a Grand Tour of Europe. The diaries start with her lover falling from the ivy outside her bedroom window and end with her being happily married. In between she visits England, France, Switzerland and Italy, where she has series of adventures and meets everyone worth meeting. The diaries had been edited by her descendant, a Mr Alexander Blacker Kerr.

The reviewer Lord Darling, an eminent High Court Judge, had entitled his review A GIRL PEPYS and compared some of the author’s descriptions as reminiscent of Smollett and L’Abbe Prevost. Other reviewers were equally enthusiastic and one with unintentional prescience wrote “In fact the whole book is full of vivid description of every day life as it was lived so long ago. It is related in so lively a fashion that the whole diary seems writ but yesterday.”. He then went on “She isn’t a modern lady in the sense that she is all leg exhibition and lipstick. In fact she lived two hundred years ago. Otherwise she is as modern as a post war flapper”.

The discovery of these diaries caused a sensation in the literary world and their publication was twice delayed so that further Impressions of the book could be printed to meet demand.

Further impetus to this demand was given by later reviews in the Observer and Times Literary Supplement. These reviews indirectly questioned the authenticity of the Diaries and rather illnaturedly suggested that Mr Alexander Blacker Kerr, who had remained very quiet during all the excitement, might like to come forward and clear up a few points of detail.

There were of course many people with a genuine interest in social history who wished to read the diaries of an 18^th Century girl, even if they were ‘surprisingly outspoken’, but there were even more who wanted read a book which might have made the experts look foolish. One reader, Winston Churchill - it is not known to which category he belonged - excused his late arrival at a dinner party by saying he had had to finish the Diary before coming.

By the New Year it was becoming widely accepted that the Diaries were a hoax and interest focused on who might have written them. This question was answered by the interviews published in The Daily Express and New York Times.

The authoress was a young girl called Magdalen King-Hall, daughter of Admiral Sir George King-Hall who had formerly been Commander-in Chief of the Australian Station. She had written the book in a few weeks while living with her parents at Hove. Her only sources of information had been her own general reading and the local public library.

Magdalen King-Hall appears to have been rather overwhelmed by her success, never having expected that the book would be taken as a genuine diary. This success had not been without its problems. What had started as an innocent joke, had got rather out of hand. There were serious misgivings within her family as to whether it was wise or even right to continue to deceive the public. Lawyers had been consulted to make sure there were no legal implications.

There had also been other minor problems. An elderly relation had felt that it was his duty to point out that some people might attribute the frank thoughts of Miss Cleone Knox to the authoress herself. A friend of her parents was so shocked by the language, which Lord Darling had described as being “of the robust order used by our troops in Flanders”, that he had torn up the book and thrown it on the fire. Other friends, who had been claiming that they were related to the editor, Mr Blacker Kerr, and therefore to Cleone Knox, were not pleased to learn their claims were the figment of their own and Miss King-Hall’s imagination.

The publisher Thornton Butterworth, was less concerned with the ethical problems and sensitivities of the authoress’s friends and relations. He astutely took every advantage of the opportunities created by Lord Darling’s review. Advertisements in the press did nothing to dispel the impression that the diaries were genuine. Miss Magdalen King-Hall’s name did not appear in any advertisement or in the book, when it was finally published in December just in time for the Christmas market. It also seems probable that one reason for delaying publication was so that copies of the book would not become available to the real experts of 18^th Century history. They would quickly have detected a number of mistakes such as the incorrect publication date of Walpole’s Castle of Otrantoe. Cleone Knox was reading it three months before it was published.

Fortunately Thornton Butterworth was the better judge of human nature. The public, still recovering from the shock of the General Strike, which had ended a fortnight earlier, was delighted at the discomfiture of the experts and bought the book in even larger numbers.

The story has another happy ending. Magdalen King-Hall wrote a letter to Lord Darling apologising for any embarrassment that she might have caused him. He invited her tea and they had a very happy and amicable meeting.

POSTSCRIPT

Since first publication The Diaries have continued to deceive the experts. In the 1982 the Folio Society planned to publish them as original diaries. The first the family knew of this plan was when an advertisement of The Folio Society’s future offerings appeared in the national press. Later in the 1980s the B.B.C. broadcast a reading of the Diaries on the assumption that they were of 18^th Century origin and therefore out of copyright. In 1994 the B.B.C. broadcast a 12 part dramatised version of the Diaries on Woman’s Hour. Once again it was assumed they were original. This repeat performance by the B.B.C. resulted in considerable press comment and the appearance of Richard Perceval Maxwell on Woman’s Hour.