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The transcription has involved a group of volunteers (listed below)working over two years. The diary itself contains over 600,000 words, and there are also associated documents including Jackson’s account book, which we aim to publish on this website in due course.
Ralph Jackson’s diary yields a great deal of information, firstly, about the life of a young apprentice in Newcastle before the industrial revolution, and, secondly, about the Cleveland area of North Yorkshire during the second half of the eighteenth century. It is also unusual among historical diaries owing to its exceptional longevity. We can trace the development of the boy into a young man, and then into the self-confident man of affairs and pillar of the local community, always on horseback to maintain his extensive network of friends and business contacts. We can trace, too, how his grammar and spelling improves and his vocabulary widens over the years. There is much material here for those interested in particular themes: the role of a rural magistrate; the banking and credit system of the day; transport by sea and road; medical affairs; agriculture. There are also more specialized topics – the local connections with Captain Cook and his colleagues – the coastal alum industry – the reading matter of an intelligent and largely self-educated aspirant to the gentry class. Above all, there is Ralph himself, cautious, respectable and hard-headed in business, yet also loving towards those closest to him, charitable to the poor, tolerant in matters of religion, and generally fair-minded and equable to everyone he encountered.
Transcribing the diaries
The youthful Ralph Jackson’s handwriting, spelling and punctuation provide plenty of problems for those who transcribe his diaries, but all three much improved as he grew older. We have tried here to reproduce exactly what he wrote and have resisted the temptation to make changes in the interests of clarity. The result is, we hope, an authentic and accurate transcription, although Jackson’s precise meaning occasionally takes a bit of working out, especially as he is rather fond of abbreviations and superscripts.
In the following text, square brackets enclose the page numbers of the original manuscript, e.g. [Book F; p.17].
Other editorial matter is also in square brackets, such as indicating a blank in the manuscript: [blank]; or reference to an unreadable word: [?].
There are also a few editorial footnotes.
Round brackets ( ) are always Jackson’s own brackets.
^ ^ enclose words which Jackson inserted later above the line.
Jackson’s use of capital letters seems rather arbitrary to the modern reader, as was common at the time, but we have kept these as he wrote them. We have also tried to retain the punctuation of the original. He relies heavily on commas and the occasional semi-colon, but is very sparing on full stops, although frequently it is difficult to distinguish between his commas and his full stops.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank David Tyrell, chief archivist at Teesside Archives, and the members of his staff, for making the diary available to us, and for their help with the project. Also, we are very grateful to the Friends of Teesside Archives, and especially to Eric and Pat James and Tom Parry, for their work in digitally photographing the entire manuscript of the diary, to Jenny Parker of Middlesbrough Reference Library for long-term support, and to Dr. S. M. Linsley for help with maps. We thank Cliff Thornton, president of the Captain Cook Society, for sharing with us his extensive knowledge of Ralph Jackson, and for his publication about the young Ralph in Newcastle, which we have found invaluable.(1) Thanks, too, to Nicholas Ward-Jackson, a descendant of Ralph Jackson, for his support, to Jacky Quarmby of the Guisborough Museum – and also a member of our group - for her work on the Jackson accounts (now held at that museum), and to Ian Alexander of Guisborough who published a pamphlet of extracts from those accounts(2). We would also like to mention the pioneering work of Grace Dixon, a local historian who probably knew more about Ralph Jackson than anyone else, but who has unfortunately died. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the support of the lottery grants programme, Awards for All, without whose initial grant the project would not have been possible.
Members of the Ralph Jackson research group
Alan Bunn
Eileen Bunn
John Crocker
Sally Dennison
Anne Foster
Liz & Mark Greenhaugh
Len Groves
Dan O’Sullivan
Hazel O’Sullivan
Ian Pearce
Jacky Quarmby
Cath Small
Barbara Taylor
John Taylor
Penny Scrope
Jennifer Roberts
Ian Wilson
(1) Bound for the Tyne, published by the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle, 2000.
(2) Selected Accounts of an 18th Century Local Country Gentleman, published by I. A. Alexander, Guisborough, n.d.
NOTE
If you wish to search the diary for a particular name or term, start by using the site search facility on this website which will show you which section(s) of the diary contain that word. Then, having downloaded that section, use the edit/find facility of Word to pinpoint its exact location(s) within the section.
