Recording time

Richard Blechynden (1759–1822) lived in Calcutta from the 1780s until his death. Why is he a suitable case study for interaction between ideas of time? His personal diary is long, detailed and candid. Its volumes provide a wealth of description and comment on daily life over about thirty years; it is fullest in the years before about 1800. A diary is of interest for my present book not least because anyone keeping one is engaged in a deliberate exercise to mark time's progress day by day. It is useful to a historian because its recollections, though always implying points of view, are (like Grierson's photographs) relatively little distorted by the known fallibility of memory. Its subject matter too may be valuable, including the mundane and the trivial: incidental details can provide unexpected data, as was shown for example in a survey of the value of diaries for India's meteorological history. 1