In modern times, diaries are private affairs, often guarded with lock and key. During the nineteenth century, diaries mostly served two purposes. First, as part of one’s religious practice. The daily habit of writing was seen as a way to both develop methodical habits and of keeping check on one’s virtues. The second, was to share observations on the outer world with family and friends. It was not until the 1930s that memoirs began to emphasize the personal.
Sharon Marcus writes in Between Women, “Victorian lifewriters who published diary excerpts valued their very failure to unveil mysteries, often praising the diarists ‘reserve’ and hastening to explain that the diaries cited did ‘not pretend to reveal personal secrets’.
Caroline Healey Dall’s forty-five volumes of journals ( kept from 1838-1911) cover her involvement with Transcendentalism, and both the Suffrage and Abolitionist Movements. Helen Reese states, “While it is clear that Dall sometimes composed with future generations in mind, she also seems to have forgotten this audience frequently, writing entries that bare her soul utterly.”
*Sunday Dec 31, 1848-
“Five of us went to this lecture (Higginson’s on American Slavery at Lyceum Hall)…A terrible explosion followed our return. I cannot to this hour imagine how father could have found the heart to make us all so miserable. He was very angry and told me that if I continue my anti slavery efforts that I should do it at the risk of losing his affection forever.”
Tuesday May 31, 1849-
“I sewed and taught Willie until it was time to attend the Anti Slavery meeting. It was intensely exciting…because after Stephen Foster had made one of his most disagreeable and repulsive speeches, Douglas rose, and vindicated his own Christianity, and that of true reform, in one of the finest that ever fell from the lips of man.”
Sunday Dec 9, 1849-
“On Monday, I went into Boston, and had my tooth filled. The whole city was full of excitement about the Webster and Parkman case. My own suspicions fixed on Littlefield from the beginning and I was glad to hear from Uncle W. before I left that he was arrested…I have been reading Ruskin’s ‘Seven Lamps’ and find it a most delicious and refreshing book…”
Tuesday July 23, 1850-
“I spent this morning sadly in a long talk with Ellen (her sister), in which she told me what she thought of my faults- of my bluntness etc, etc. and in which she undertook to tell me that father was on the eve of disinheriting me, on account of my reform notions….I despair of ever being understood rightly in my own family…I had no comfort that afternoon- save in resting my aching head & eyes on my husband’s busom- as I wept. I began to read ‘Jane Eyre’ over- for comfort.”
W. Newton Mass. Boston-Convention Wednesday Sept 19, 1855-
“… Miss Hunt welcomed the people, Mrs Davis read her address, and then I followed with my own report (a survey of the laws of Massachusetts regarding married women) – which had a most unmerited success. E.P. Whipple said it was the ablest thing done in the Convention, some stupid person said that it would have done Dan. Webster credit!”
Tuesday Nov 30, 1858-
“Had a pleasant interview with Mr. Browne, and a talk with him about Margaret Fuller. He said that she was an inspired Bacante and that it was in that style that she sought influence- therefore Emerson retired and so forth. Browne so out Emersons, Emerson, that I could not ask him if he meant her influence was sexual- yet surely that is the English of that phrase?…Certainly her vigor lay partly in the hot current of her blood- but so does that of all women to a degree seldom understood by men…”
* diary excerpts from Daughter of Boston, The Extraordinary Diary of a 19th Century Woman by Caroline Healey Dall. Edited by Helen Reese
other source and suggested reading: Between Women by Sharon Marcus