Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Summerscale Kate

Author:Summerscale, Kate [Summerscale, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-04-29T23:00:00+00:00

Although people had kept records of their domestic and spiritual lives for hundreds of years, the practice spread dramatically in the early-nineteenth century. Before then, most journals had been household books, private to the family rather than to the individual, and secret thoughts were enclosed in letters to trusted friends. The fashion for private diaries was fuelled by the popularity of Romantic poetry, which prized introspection, and by the first publications of personal journals: the seventeenth-century diaries of John Evelyn originally appeared in 1818 and those of Pepys in 1825. The number of diaries published each year doubled in the 1820s, and in the 1830s reached a peak that was maintained into the 1850s. In most cases, the authors of these journals had not imagined that their words would one day be read by strangers. An eighteenth-century diary by Isabella’s ancestor Samuel Curwen, whose branch of the family had emigrated to the United States from Cumberland, was published in 1842. The preface quoted Curwen’s plea: ‘may [these papers] prove an entertainment to my friends, to whom I commend them, requesting their care to keep them from the inspection of all others, they being negligently written and but for the eye of candor and friendship’. The promise of openness drew in the reader, while the editor insisted that publication of Curwen’s diary was ‘in no wise a violation of his injunction’, but ‘due to his memory’.

Made-up diaries had also become commonplace by the 1850s. The epistolary novel of the eighteenth century, in which a story was told through letters, had gradually given way to the diary novel, in which the heroine wrote missives to herself. The beginnings of this shift could be traced to Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular Pamela (1740), in which the narrator’s letters to her parents are replaced, as she becomes more isolated, with something closer to a journal. In Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Extracted from her Own Journal (1761) the heroine writes a series of letters to a confidante, but the terms in which she describes her enterprise anticipate the deeper secrecy of the private diarist: ‘to you only, my second self … to you I am bound by solemn promise, and reciprocal confidence, to disclose the inmost secrets of my soul, and with you they are as safe as in my own breast’.

Some of the first diary novels of the nineteenth century purported to be real. The Diary of an Ennuyée, published anonymously in 1826, was described by its publisher as a journal discovered among the effects of a young woman who had died of tuberculosis. Soon afterwards it was exposed as a fictional work by Anna Brownell Jameson. In a preface to a subsequent edition, Mrs Jameson apologised for having pretended that the journal was genuine: ‘the intention was not to create an illusion, by giving to fiction the appearance of truth; but, in fact, to conceal truth by throwing over it the veil of fiction’. Also originally taken to be authentic

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