5 - Capturing Martha

Summary

THE TWO MARTHAS

This final attempt at reconstructing a Victorian honeymoon returns to Martha Rolls Macready, to her honeymoon diary, and to the moment I discuss in Chapter 3 where reading archival sources gives way to speculation. Although in that chapter I frame the problem of interpreting Martha's diary in terms of a climactic moment of epistemological refusal – Martha does not tells us the cause of her new husband Edward's “low spirits” that have so shaped her experience of the honeymoon – Martha's diary also presents more quotidian mysteries: references to books, to medical procedures, to people who write to or visit her. These mysteries of the everyday are, of course, usually “resolved” by scholars through research and, for the reader, by annotation. This chapter consists of two parts: extended annotated excerpts from Martha's diary, in which I provide as literally and as conscientiously as I can “solutions” to the small referential mysteries, and a speculative ending free (at last) from annotation or other scholarly apparatus. The first part lingers in and only rarely strays from the imperatives of historical research. If there is something wrong about or missing from my account of the context for Martha's diary, it is because I have made a mistake, because I have not used the archive sufficiently well, or because the reference books, histories, biographies, images, newspapers, or other primary sources on which I depend do not have the information I need.