Introduction

Summary

If Oscar Wilde is to be believed, keeping a personal diary was a common activity among middle class women in the late nineteenth century, but the two he satirises so delightfully in The Importance of being Earnest are young and unmarried. Charlotte Bousfield was long married and not far off being a grandmother when she first took up her pen.

These words are appropriate, not only because they encapsulate what this volume is about, but also because they were written by John Hamilton, the great-grandson of Charlotte Bousfield, the diarist herself, as the introduction to his own transcript of her diaries.

Diaries were written and read long before the nineteenth century, and they come in many forms. The Paston letters are the earliest English example, dating from the fifteenth century. Although a collection of letters, rather than strictly a diary, they are similar to the Bousfield diaries in that they constitute a record of the events in the lives of a middle-class family, largely from the point of view of the woman who is in many ways at its centre, Margaret Paston. One of the fascinations of reading both of these accounts, so far apart in time, is the way in which the personality of the writer gradually emerges.

Another similarity they share is that the audience, the readership, is defined. The Paston letters are each addressed to one person. Charlotte's diaries begin in 1878 with the expression of her hope that they ‘will be profitable to myself & perhaps interesting to my children’. This seems to have been the case, as her entry for 26 February 1883 states that although she has considered giving it up ‘my children seem to be so much interested in listening to some of the records of the past with which I occasionally amuse them that for their sakes more than by my own wish in the matter I will continue a remembrance of the chief events of our family life’.

And so she did, and the audience for whom she was writing would understand what she was saying. They would put faces to names, and call up contexts unconsciously and without effort in order to bring to the text a subtext of shared experience, and so to make full sense of it.