‘Journal of the Plague Year 1951,’ declared the title of the first Burgess notebook I transcribed as a new Archive Volunteer for the Foundation. Meanwhile, its last page — flipped upside-down and used as a second starting point for the diarist, so that you can read the notebook from both ends — bore another ominous title: ‘Down with Big Brother.’
In the year of our plague 2020, and increased mass surveillance, this certainly felt like some kind of fate. ‘Now all the world is but a hospital,’ Burgess later quotes in one of his entries, another eerie coincidence which I experienced while examining the notebook during this pandemic. But these oddly fitting references weren’t what originally drew me to work with this journal for my primary archival project, supervised by the Foundation’s dedicated and supportive archivist, Anna Edwards.
It intrigued me as the sole notebook of 14 in the Archive’s collection that was shared between Burgess and his first wife Lynne, born Llewela Jones. I’d always wanted to know more about Lynne as her own person, rather than the alcoholic ex-wife or reduced muse whose wartime trauma helped to inspire A Clockwork Orange. I felt this way especially because Burgess himself tended to belittle Lynne’s many accomplishments.
Published on The Burgess Foundation Blog.
Viv Pencz 
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