Sharon Turner recorded his memories of his life in the 1790s, and especially his courtship of Mary Watts, the daughter of landscape artist and radical William Watts in a set of manuscripts which are only incompletely preserved in their original form - although we have a notebook in the hand of one of his children producing a clean copy of the bulk of his reflections.

This edition of the Diary has been transcribed, edited and introduced by Clare Clarke and Mark Philp. The work was undertaken by Clare when she was an undergraduate at the University of Warwick and she was supported by funding from the University's URSS scheme.

As the introduction makes clear, this is a distinctive account of like in the 1790s by someone who did not identify with the cause of reform, nor with the loyalist reaction. Upcott was an aspiring copy-right lawyer, who later became one of the country's foremost Anglo-Saxon historians.

The diary is in pdf form and can be downloaded here.Link opens in a new window