File:Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries- Volume 7, page 38, March 21, 1855.jpg

Transcription:

[ram]bled on in a most wearisome manner, and not one tenth part of what he [Amos Chinner] said was comprehendible. Mrs Chinner said little, and is a good meaning sort of woman enough, But I have no one feeling or liking in common with ‘em, and the afternoon passed away most drearily. I was called upon to admire Stoke Newington Church in bright worsted, upon a chaos of mustard colored grass, with spiky salmon colored clouds in its rear, also a big, nay, a colossal Abraham and his family, or Lot and his daughters, or something of the sort; this and more being the handiwork of Miss Mary Anne Chinner. She’s by no means a chicken, (thirty five or so I’ll swear,) bustles about sharply, chatters incessantly, is utterly common-place throughout, and has no jot of womanly grace or feeling about her. The canting and churchgoing business is much modified now, she having hocked a “young man,” and that “young man,” Ned [Gunn]. She, and her mother manage the business, make out hills &c, and with the help of a cousin, (a good-humored countryborn fellow, whom report says “Mary Anne” was desperately “in love” with, once;) do everything, Miss Chinner being as her father once remarked to Charley [Gunn], “as good a Butcher as he is.” He’s a hospitable, rambling old boy, and has been a fast countryman in his youth. / Now all this nuisance had to be endured, because we happen to be Ned’s brothers; in pursuance of the English middle-class system that when a fellow contemplates matrimony he is, firstly to be trotted about to all the girl’s friends, that they may “approve” of Betsy Jane’s young man, next that the relatives must know and bore one another, or they’d be offed offended. I had to be bored for half a day at Stoke Newington, not because Miss Chinner cared a quarter of an ounce of bad meat’s worth