On Journals and Blogs...

I thought about this after reading Dorothy and Thomas Hoolber's The Monsters - a book about the Shelleys, Lord Byron and their unusual households.

The summer that Mary Godwin ran away with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley, she and the poet wrote a journal together. Many people wrote a journal - many of those journals were written during travels and were eventually published - since most people couldn't travel, these journals gave them a sense of the world.

Biographers owe their information to journals. Interestingly, the Hooblers note that many of the pages in Mary Shelley's journal and her stepsister's journal (Clair was a paramour of Byron and possibly Shelley) had been removed - time periods and notations of things that could have shed more light on the intricate relationships of these creative people.

After his death, Mary Shelley spent time reviewing her husband's journals and letters, expunging any parts of his history that would not have lived up to the aura she was building. As a free-thinker of the beginning of the early Victorian period, Percy Shelley's life needed expunging.

Blogs are the journals of the 21st century with one huge difference: blogs go public immediately. No one will be expunging anything I've written here. It's already published to the world - or at the least the world that cares.

Trust me. I write with that knowledge