JOURNALS AND DIARIES

Journals and diaries, accounts of everyday events, are among the most prevalent forms of literature written by common people, prominent figures, and celebrated authors alike. Dating back to the fifteenth century in Europe (and earlier elsewhere), diary keeping was well established by the time the first settlers arrived in British North America during the 1600s and 1700s. At that time diaries and journals served miscellaneous purposes, both practical and imaginative. They were cherished as spiritual and intellectual anchors during turbulent times precipitated by, for example, long journeys or war; or they charted the soul's progress, revealed God's divine plan, and proffered, in the case of the Puritans, evidence of "election," or predestined salvation. By the 1820s diaries and journals, along with the new nation, had become more sizable, complex, and eclectic, and they continued to develop along those lines until the 1870s. They provided a forum for negotiating change and upheaval acutely experienced by westward pioneers, sojourning politicians, Civil War civilians and soldiers, and even professional authors pondering the national spirit of growth, movement, and dislocation. As white women achieved higher levels of schooling, they, along with some free African American women, increasingly turned to diaries as self-reflective and expressive outlets. So esteemed was diary writing as a mark of intellectual attainment that many people practiced it for its own sake, sometimes maintaining the routine for decades. Each one a unique artifact that reveals through its author's eyes how life was mentally constructed in another era, the diary surpasses other records of the past for its sense of social and cultural immediacy. In talented hands, certainly those of eminent authors, the nineteenth-century journal achieved an elevated, literary quality. As multivalent productions, diaries and journals justly hold a notable place in American literary history.

DEFINITIONS AND TYPES

Specialists strain to define precisely the "diary" or "journal," but a consensus might form around the following: both are dated, timely records of everyday incidents, often written on a daily basis. The two terms are usually considered synonymous, but some prefer to draw distinctions. While the generic term "diary" may encompass all "journals," the latter word is occasionally reserved for records of work, such as farming or business; it may, conversely, signify an ideational, inwardly reflective record rather than one (namely, a diary) describing exoteric occurrences. Given that most nineteenth-century diaries are at least partially contemplative or work oriented and most journals are relatively descriptive, elusive distinctions between the two etymologically related words are usually abandoned.

In format and style, nineteenth-century diaries varied considerably. Dated entries might be penned or penciled on loose sheets of paper, in hand-sewn pamphlets, manufactured predated "pocketbooks," almanacs, cloth-covered blank books, or expensive leather-bound volumes. Despite good intentions, diarists seldom wrote every day or over long periods of time. They neglected their journals because illness, work, or indifference precluded writing. Conscientious backsliders, however, filled in gaps of days, weeks, or even years with a generalized, retrospective entry. By transforming diaries, or parts of them, into scrapbooks of news clippings or albums of original essays and poems, diarists breached standard forms of journal keeping. Some even jotted down lists of books they read or lent out to neighbors. Such transgressions mark out diaries as creative, rather than hackneyed, endeavors.

Contrary to what one might expect, diaries were generally public rather than private ventures. Epistolary diaries, written as letters with dated entries and sent to a correspondent, necessarily eluded privacy as they were meant to be read by one or perhaps more recipients. Indeed most diaries addressed an audience: a specific, contemporary one such as a spouse or child; future generations; or even imagined readers that informed the writer's tone and style. Few people in the nineteenth century could have envisioned the modern, clandestine mode of diary keeping. Instead diaries were commonly read aloud to family or friends, loaned, copied, and emulated. Needless to say, diarists sometimes censored themselves and discreetly rendered intimate matters.

General incentives, such as self-improvement and a desire to memorialize passing days, gave diaries their universal appeal. Diaries instilled discipline, honed writing skills, and activated thought. They additionally captured, in pen and ink, evanescent episodes easily forgotten. More specific motivations for beginning, continuing, or terminating a diary, however, imply discrete types: the situational, the life, and the spiritual diary.

Situational diaries, commenced at important junctures in life, were the largest group. Milestone events such as a new marriage, courtship, the death of a family member, an expedition, or a voyage were all likely impetuses for starting this type of journal, as were nationally significant phenomena, including the Civil War, western migration, and the California gold rush. People coped with these stressful life transformations by confiding to a journal. The very act of daily writing stabilized unsettled emotions and helped illuminate patterns within the seemingly chaotic flow of events. Predictably, with the catalyzing condition's cessation, such as a sojourn's end, came the diary's abandonment. Sometimes, however, they survived for years longer. If so, they became life diaries.

Life diaries, more thematically complex and longer than situational diaries, nonetheless emerged from them. Although they usually were begun at a crucial life moment, life diaries inevitably strayed from their original thematic purpose. They conveyed no single purpose or topical focus and instead seemingly adjusted themselves to life's ever-vacillating phases. Life diaries written during the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s were more likely to highlight periods of travel than earlier ones. They also acquired a more intimate tone as the century progressed. Nonetheless, for life diarists writing itself became a habitual, worthy exercise. Because changing conditions little affected the diarists' tenacity, they often wrote over decades in several volumes. Some families—such as that of President John Adams, his son John Quincy, and grandson Charles Francis—sustained a multigenerational diary.

The New England Puritan spiritual diary that flourished during the seventeenth century still attracted a few practitioners in the early 1800s. Instead of evidencing "election," the later ones simply demonstrated piety in a secularized era. Quakers dutifully composed them to exhibit faith publicly; these were always conceived for others to read for testimony of the diarists' religiosity. Even though the spiritual diary had all but vanished by 1820, its influence could still be discerned in transcendentalist diaries that located spiritual design in natural phenomena. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), for one, perceived unity in nature's disparate elements while studying and reflecting upon his journal.

This excerpt from the first entry in Harriett Low's travel diary reveals the public nature of such writings and their agency in relieving stress.

1829 Sunday May 24th Embarked on board Ship Sumatra bound to Manilla from thence to Macao where I shall probably take up my residence for the next 4 years and for you my Dear Sister [Mary Ann Low] shall this journal be kept. I left home at 5 o'clock with feeling not to be described, nor imagined, but by those who have been placed in a similar situation. We were escorted out, as far as Baker's Island by a few friends from Salem which made it rather pleasanter for me though I cannot say that I enjoyed any thing that took place that day.

Low, Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life: The Journal of Harriett Low, Travelling Spinster, Part One: 1829–1832, p. 19.

DIARIES AND LITERATURE

A self-conscious literary enhancement of observations distinguishes nineteenth-century diaries from earlier ones. Inspired by Romantics drawn to imagination and intuition, contemplation of nature, and a spirit of rebellious individualism, diarists frequently embellished their entries with stylistic flourishes, metaphorical language, and fanciful descriptions that roused introspective meditations. Some injected diaries with novelistic suspense, even melodrama, or treated acquaintances populating everyday life scenes as if they were fictive characters. It is no wonder that numerous authors kept journals to develop distinctive writing styles. Outstanding literary diarists include the historian Francis Parkman, President John Quincy Adams, and the novelist Eliza Francis Andrews.

Often ranked with the finest literary accomplishments, authors' diaries in turn illustrated the process of literary production. Besides honing style, diaries yielded material, in the form of direct passages or drafts, for publications. Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) journal, thought by many to be his major work, was the wellspring of lectures and publications including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). In his "Notebooks," Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) developed ideas and characters for The Blithedale Romance (1852), The Marble Faun (1860), and Our Old Home (1863). Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington Irving (1783–1859) distilled publications from their diaries, yet they eschewed printing the diaries themselves.

By printing exceptional and curious diaries, or memoirs and biographies typically saturated with journal excerpts, publishers gratified American readers' craving for a glimpse of other people's lives. Heavily edited journals were published as volumes, while others were excerpted in popular periodicals and in historical societies' proceedings catering to genealogists. Contemporary exploration and travel accounts such as Henry R. Schoolcraft's Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansas (1821) and John C. Fremont's Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1845) sated the demand for adventure. The Missouri journalist Edwin Bryant's exploration journal, What I Saw in California (1848), peppered with western folk legends, historical allusions, and witty digressions, appeared with the appended sensational record of a California-bound Donner party member who witnessed his starving companions' cannibalism. Not so sensational but equally marketable as veritable success stories, spiritual guides, heroic fables, or villainous downfalls were the Boston industrialist Amos Lawrence's Extracts (1855), the missionary David Brainerd's Memoirs (1822), President George Washington's Diary (1860), the antislavery actress Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble's Journal (1863), and the duelist-traitor Aaron Burr's Private Journal (1838). Among a spate of Civil War diaries by Confederate war clerks, Union officers, chaplains, prisoners of war, and army surgeons published after 1865, the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) stands out for its dignified portrait of African American soldiers. Although there was no shortage of publishable native diaries, lax copyright laws allowed American publishers to pirate popular European editions of Samuel Pepys's Diary and John Gibson Lockhart's Life, about the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, among others. Diaries, like novels, allured readers who would vicariously live another life. It is no wonder that diary fiction was so popular.

Diary fiction—satire, novels, or short stories that employed the diary form to weave a first-person, present-tense narrative—simulated actual diaries. Most were not intentional hoaxes, but they could fool the unwary. In diary fiction, events appear to be unfolding in timely fashion as the fictive narrator, namely the diarist, ostensibly writes entries in real time, not knowing what will happen the next day. In some pieces a third-person voice, the diary's supposed publisher or discoverer, for instance, prefaces or periodically comments upon the text, thereby conjuring an illusion of the manuscript's authenticity. American authors looked to published sea, travel, and spiritual diaries for inspiration but also British and European literary precedents, including Joseph Addison's "Journal of a Sober Citizen" (1712), a satire about self-improvement diaries, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), a letter-journal novel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the first true diary novel. Edgar Allan Poe's (1809–1849) "Ms. Found in a Bottle" (1833), an early American diary story, weaves a horrifying tale of a doomed voyager who writes even as a violent whirlpool sinks his ship; as the title suggests, the journal, safely tucked in a bottle, later washes up on shore. Poe's "Journal of Julius Rodman" (1840), supposedly left by the "first" explorer to cross the Rocky Mountains in 1792, was so convincing that it was mentioned, as if authentic, in the U.S. Senate documents (26th Congress, 1839–1840). The prolific cheap-fiction author Joseph Holt Ingraham employed the genre in The Diary of a Hackney Coachman (1844), a novelette about the mysterious death of an affable coach driver whose diary, when discovered, inculpates his murderer. Other examples include Lucius Manlius Sargent's Diary of Rev. Solomon Spittle (1847), John Greenleaf Whittier's Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal (1849), and Caroline H. Woods's The Diary of a Milliner (1867).

Nineteenth-century readers could readily see their own diary-keeping habits mirrored in a wide array of publications. It is not surprising then that they used diaries for making transcriptions of and comments on published literature. These diaries resembled commonplace books, storehouses of citations, but the former melded mundane observations with literary ones. Not only did authors such as Emerson and Thoreau liberally sprinkle their journals with quotations or ideas culled from books they read, so too did ordinary diarists who valued the printed word. Whereas biblical references abounded, allusions to other religious and secular literature were also numerous. Responses to reading materials ranging from short declarations of satisfaction or disappointment to lengthy digressions that interweave book review–type comments with the diarist's personal cogitations are found in journals, especially those by highly literate New Englanders. However, a diverse set of mill workers, housewives, retirees, and students from that region periodically engaged even transcendentalist literature, notwithstanding its enigmatic language. Much of it was casually encountered, through periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly or at the public lyceum, where auditors took copious mental notes for their diaries. Diaries thus inventively interwove literature into pages otherwise devoted to everyday affairs.

RACE, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER

By the early nineteenth century some African Americans, immigrants, laborers or lower-class people and many more white women than before took up the practice of diary keeping. Hampered by laws prohibiting slave literacy, most enslaved African Americans could not (or dared not) write. Extant written retrospectives or autobiography told to white amanuenses, such as slave narratives or freed people's (emancipated slaves) reminiscences, have received more scholarly attention than diaries maintained by several free African Americans. James A. Healy, son of an Irish Georgia plantation owner and an African American slave, left a fascinating academic diary (1849–1850), still housed at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was a Catholic seminarian. William Johnson, a wealthy Natchez, Mississippi, landowner, proprietor, and moneylender, born into slavery but freed in 1821, kept a highly detailed record (1835–1851) of his business affairs, leisure activities, and southern high society. Like their white literate counterparts, African American Union soldiers, chaplains, and orderlies on the Civil War battlefield immortalized their heroic acts in diaries, but many of these have been only recently published.

Extraordinary for its high literary caliber, narrative propulsion (diaries can seem aimless), and outspoken sense of racial identity, the diary of Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837–1914), a schoolteacher and published author, has become one of the most important of American diaries. Grimké began it in 1854 upon moving from Philadelphia to Salem, Massachusetts, to attend grammar school; after graduating in 1855 she continued it while teaching in the same town and later in the Sea Islands off South Carolina, where she taught freed people during the Civil War. A distinctly erudite sensibility pervades the diary, chock-full of meditations upon lyceum lectures, poetry, history, and travel books. Equally imbued with emotional outpourings, it discloses Grimké's painful grappling with bigotry and slavery's legality within a democracy.

This passage from Edgar Allan Poe's "Ms. Found in a Bottle" (1833) demonstrates the diary fiction writer's art. Here the diarist-narrator locates his writing implements and devises a method for preserving his journal.

It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate—it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain's own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Ms. Found in a Bottle," in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, edited by James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), pp. 9–10.

Very few diaries of first- and second-generation literate immigrants, notably Germans and the Irish, who arrived in great numbers after 1840, survived, but those that did candidly portray the hardships of dislocation and resettlement or bitingly criticize American culture, society, and politics. The Bavarian immigrant and devout Jew Abraham Kohn began his German-language diary prior to embarking for New York in 1842 and continued it until 1843, while peddling goods under much tribulation in New England. His longings for home seem only to magnify his woe over his precarious occupation and abject poverty. The three-volume published work My Diary (1862–1866), by the Polish emigré and U.S. State Department translator Adam Gurowski, elicited notices in the influential North American Review (January 1863, April 1864) and Continental Monthly (April 1864) rebuking his unflattering wartime observations. Travelers or other observers sometimes wrote about the immigrant experience. Thomas Cather detailed his tumultuous 1836 voyage from Limavady, Ireland, to New York, the city's shockingly fast pace, and encounters with what he called "yankeefied" Irish, seemingly bent on moneymaking.

Due to their rising literacy rates, more women produced diaries in the early 1800s than in either of the two previous centuries. Though similar in many ways to men's, women's diaries have some distinguishing characteristics. In that they mainly recount household rhythms, they reflect gender prescriptions limiting women to domestic work. They also reveal a greater consciousness of family, community, and generational ties. Women used diaries instrumentally, as outlets for self-affirmative reflection under disempowering conditions, such as abusive marriages, long and risky trips, or warfare. The case of pioneer women stands out. They expressed fears about their journey's ultimate success of which menfolk, conversely, stoically assured themselves. These women also saw Indians' gestures through a lens of cooperation rather than combat. All in all, diaries gave women a sense of efficacy at a time when they were granted but little independence.

Gender differences broke down regarding the preferred form of diary. Women sometimes penned entries in pocket diaries that were widely available in America after 1850. These small, printed, and predated books that fit conveniently into the pocket were designed for businessmen and professionals as well as for women. Alongside printed pages devoted to interest tables and other statistics or useful information for investors, women tersely jotted down their domestic activities, social calls, and reading in the small spaces allotted for each day. Women who kept records of spending on food or sewing items used these diaries' "cash accounts" section for quite different purposes than men, who might record business-related spending.

Although most nineteenth-century women's diaries are inherently valuable windows on historic domestic and community life, several qualitatively surpass the mean for their literariness and shrewd insight. The sojourner Harriett Low's (1809–1877) witty and self-reflective journal (1829–1834), kept for her sister in Salem, Massachusetts, offers singular, scathing portrayals of life among international merchants trading with China; her copious entries about assorted books illuminate middle-class women's reading tastes. Helen McCowen Carpenter's diary of her Kansas-to-California journey (1857) is remarkable for its spirited, vivid details, skillfully woven narrative, and novel-like structure. The southerner Mary Boykin Chesnut's diary (1861–1865), striking for its well-crafted expository writing, is also outstanding for its shrewd portrayal of civilians' wartime experience and contemporary attitudes toward slavery. Aware of her diary's value as a cultural and social document, Chesnut revised and augmented her original entries for publication.

Although only a few of them ever published their work, nineteenth-century diarists usually wrote with other readers in mind. Diaries were, then, less a mirror image of the self than a window on the world. Over time, as they became increasingly private, they became more candidly revealing of the writer's everyday activities and internal states of mind. Precisely because they acted as confidants, diaries throughout much of the twentieth century often came equipped with lock and key. In the early twenty-first century, on Internet "weblogs," "bloggers" have forgone privacy to publish their daily thoughts and activities. Links between bloggers create an electronic community that allows them to converse among themselves. This revival of the social diary, oddly enough, also links bloggers with the nineteenth century and places them within the historically situated community of diarists who wrote, reflected, and most of all shared their life stories with others.

See alsoAutobiography; Blacks; Civil War; Exploration and Discovery; Female Authorship; Immigration; Irish; Jews; Literacy; Transcendentalism; Travel Writing

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cather, Thomas. Voyage to America: The Journals of ThomasCather. Edited by Thomas Yoseloff. New York and London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961.

Kohn, Abraham. "A Jewish Peddler's Diary." Edited by Abram Vossen Goodman. In Critical Studies in American Jewish History, edited by Jacob R. Marcus, pp. 45–73. Cincinnati, Ohio: American Jewish Archives, 1971.

Low, Harriett. Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life: TheJournal of Harriett Low, Travelling Spinster. 2 vols. Edited by Nan P. Hodges and Arthur W. Hummel. Woodinville, Wash.: History Bank, 2002.

Secondary Works

Bunkers, Suzanne L. "Introduction." In Diaries of Girls andWomen: A Midwestern American Sampler, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers, pp. 3–40. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2001.

Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff. "Issues in Studying Women's Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction." In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, pp. 1–20. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Cobb-Moore, Geneva. "When Meanings Meet: The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké." In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, pp. 139–155. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Culley, Margo, ed. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature ofAmerican Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press, 1985.

Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The IrishAmerican Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Jackson, Blyden. A History of Afro-American Literature. Vol. 1, The Long Beginning, 1746–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

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McCarthy, Molly. "A Pocketful of Days: Pocket Diaries and Daily Record Keeping among Nineteenth-Century New England Women." New England Quarterly 73 (2000): 274–296.

Pollin, Burton R. "Introduction." In The Journal of Julius Rodman." In Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, The Imaginary Voyages, edited by Burton R. Pollin, pp. 508–515. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Sattelmeyer, Robert. "Historical Introduction." In TheWritings of Henry D. Thoreau, vol. 2, Journal, 1842–1848, edited by Robert Sattelmeyer, pp. 445–466. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Sattelmeyer, Robert. "The Remaking of Walden." In Writing the American Classics, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, pp. 53–78. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Schlissel, Lillian. Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken, 1982.

Wink, Amy L. She Left Nothing in Particular: TheAutobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women's Diaries. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. EverydayIdeas: Socio-Literary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, forthcoming.

Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. "Transcendentalism in Print: Production, Dissemination, and Common Reception." In Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, pp. 310–381. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999.

Ronald J. Zboray Mary Saracino Zboray