Travels of a London Schoolboy: 1826-1830 John Pocock’s diary of life in London and voyages to Cape Town and Australia
By John Pocock
In 1826, a boy, nearly twelve years old and living in Kilburn, picked up an old account book of his father’s, and on the unused pages began a diary which he was to keep for his lifetime.
John Pocock, the son of a once prosperous builder in late-Georgian London, began his work just at a time when his father faced financial ruin from a mixture of market forces and bad judgment. Poignantly he relates the comforts of a fine house and a busy social life, but also the long walks to Southwark to see his father in a debtors’ prison. The young man walks everywhere – sometimes astonishing distances – around London and even to Hastings. And he tells his story with perception, humour and with a fine eye for the detail of life in London.
After the completion of his schooling and a series of ill-rewarded and tedious jobs, he is apprenticed to a surgeon and sails for the Swan River Settlement near modern Perth in Australia and finally Cape Town, where he settles and invites his young brother, Lewis, to join him. His account of the perils of voyages under sail – and Lewis’s own equally vivid and humorous narrative of his journey to the Cape – are great stories of the sea.
Travels of a London Schoolboy are an account of the joys and disasters of family life in late Georgian London – and of the dangerous voyages under sail to Australia and South Africa – told with frankness and humour.