Diaries

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diaries, diarists. The tradition of diary keeping in England seems to date from the 17th cent. The motives of the earlier diarists are unknown, but an awareness that they were living in turbulent times may have inspired the most celebrated of diarists, Pepys and Evelyn. The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683 (ed. Alan Macfarlane, 1976) gives an intimate portrait of the domestic life, illnesses, and religious attitudes of a clergyman-farmer in Essex. There are many Nonconformist diaries, including those of the ex-communicant Oliver Heywood (1630–1702), published in 4 vols. (1881–5), and the Presbyterian Peter Walkden (1684–1769); the Journal of the Revd John Wesley is perhaps the finest example in this tradition. Self-awareness emerges in the licentious London Journal of Boswell, written for his friend John Jonston, and unpublished until 1950 (ed. F. A. Pottle). By the late 18th cent. diary-keeping was commonplace, and authors frequently intended publication, as did F. Burney, whose first diary (1767) was addressed to Nobody ‘since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved’. Byron's friend T. Moore instructed his executors to publish his Journal (1818–41) to ‘afford the means of making some provision for my wife and family’. Literary and artistic circles are recorded in the journals of D. Wordsworth, and in those of the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), whose last entry records his suicide.

The flourishing tradition of political diaries began with the Memoirs (1821–60) of C. Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, which were criticized for indiscretion when published between 1874 and 1887. 20th-cent. diarists have made a virtue of indiscretion, and have also benefited from post-Freudian self-analysis. The diaries of diplomat H. Nicolson and the urbane parliamentarian and socialite Henry ‘ Chips’ Channon (1897–1958), the latter edited by Robert Rhodes James from a massive thirty volumes in 1967, are as noteworthy for their colourful gossip as for their historical records. 20th-cent. literary diarists, with widely contrasted styles and purposes, include V. Woolf, Alan Bennett, E. Waugh, and N. Coward. Architectural historian James Lees-Milne (1908–97) published several highly praised sharp and anecdotal volumes principally describing upper-class and country-house life. The late 20th-cent. vogue for sexual candour is exemplified in the Diaries (1986, ed. John Lahr) of the homosexual playwright Joe Orton. Recently the questionable practice of writing diaries for virtually immediate publication has become routine in both politics and the arts: notable examples are the Diaries (1993) of politician Alan Clark; Peter Hall's Diaries (1983, ed. John Goodwin), and The Roy Strong Diaries 1967–87 (1997), by art historian Sir Roy Strong (1935– ). Comic fictional diaries were popular in the 1880s, the most celebrated example being the Grossmiths' The Diary of a Nobody (1892), and have recently been successfully revived with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend (1982; originally created for BBC) and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996).