Your Favourite Diaries

Tell us about your favourite diaries, new and old

Over the coming months, the Favourite Diaries page of the Day Books website will explore a wide range of diaries and diarists, from the past thousand years and from every continent. It will ask why people keep diaries, and how – and what diaries can tell us about the past, the present and the future.
An important part of this project will be your input. We want you to email lives@day-books.com and tell us about the diaries you love most – and what you’ve learnt from them.

Tell us about your favourite diaries, new and old … And if you’re a diarist yourself, you can publish your work online. Just email lives@day-books.com

What’s it like to be Prince Charles? Rock musician Pete Townshend got a personal insight when the Who played an emotional comeback concert at Leeds in June 2006. ‘I was treated like Prince Charles,’ he wrote in his online diary, ‘and found that the best way to behave was a little like he might.’

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The Dear Departed

Josef Herman’s Journals is a wonderful book – full of extraordinary and beautiful insights into life and art – but there’s one passage which particularly haunts me. On 21 December 1983 he wrote: ‘A few months ago I thought I was going to die. I tore up all my diaries. Only two copy books remained, which I found later. Now I am sorry I did this. I am still alive and without them. I feel I created a sort of emptiness around myself.’

At least Herman came to realise how important his diaries were to him, and perhaps we are lucky that any volumes survived at all, because there are so many different ways in which diaries can be lost. If they are not destroyed by their own author, they may be thrown away or destroyed after the diarist’s death. Francis Kilvert’s wonderful diaries suffered a double blow; first his wife destroyed two large sections of the manuscript, and then nineteen of the twenty-two surviving notebooks were destroyed by his niece, in one of the worst acts of literary vandalism in recent times.

Several volumes of Lewis Carroll’s diaries have disappeared, too: the diaries for the four years leading up to the writing of Alice, when Lewis Carroll spent much of his time in the north-east of England. The author and artist Bryan Talbot, in his brilliant book Alice in Sunderland, speculates that they were suppressed by Lewis Carroll’s family in ‘an attempt to edit Wonderland’s Sunderland roots out of the Oxford myth’.

But there doesn’t always have to be a reason for diaries to disappear. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman was so worried that his journals might go missing that he wrote the words ‘Reward if found’ on each volume. But on 11 May 1993, he recorded: ‘I lost my hospital diary in a taxi this morning, something I’ve always dreaded. We will see if “Reward if found” means anything.’ Unfortunately it didn’t, and two of Derek Jarman’s manuscript diaries have yet to surface.

In Dorothy Wordsworth's famous Grasmere journals, the entry for 22 December 1801 ends in mid-sentence, and then there are no further entries till 10 October 1802 ('Coleridge went to Keswick'). Scholars agree that there was once a fifth notebook, in additon to the four that have been published. Over the years there has been speculation that the notebook was destroyed because it contained evidence of an incestuous relationship between Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William. But Frances Wilson, whose new book The Ballad of Dortohy Wordsworth sheds much new light on Dorothy's state of mind while she was keeping these journals, has dismissed the idea as completely implausible. If the missing notebook was not deliberately destroyed, therefore, it is possible that one day it may yet be found.

On a more personal level, I still haven’t given up hope that Henry Peerless’s missing diary from 1902 will one day reappear – but until then, I’ll have to assume that it too has been destroyed. Unless … you know otherwise?

Some people regard their dreams as the most significant aspects of their lives ... and, thanks to this, artist Jesse Reklaw has spent the past decade compiling 'a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world'.

I'm not sure if it's the most authentic kind of diary - but it's certainly one of the most entertaining!

In February 2006, the Prince of Wales went to court to try and stop a British newspaper from publishing extracts from his personal travel diaries. The case was reported widely in the press, and there was much debate about whether the Prince’s diaries could actually be any good. To many people in the media, the fact that Prince Charles kept a diary was just another sign of how eccentric and out-of-touch he was with the realities of the modern world. And even the Prince’s own barrister – Hugh Tomlinson QC – commented disparagingly that many people might regard keeping a travel diary as ‘a rather old-fashioned thing to do’.

Old-fashioned? I was so amazed when I heard this that I wrote it straight down – then I went to look on the internet. On Google, a search for ‘travel blog’ produced about 262 million hits. On www.blogger.com, one of the biggest sites for weblogs, I found no less that 7,422,506 posts matching the word ‘travel’. I clicked on one of these, a site called travelblog.org, and discovered that on this one site alone there had been 300 updated blogs, 81 new bloggers and 2896 new photos in the previous 24 hours. Old-fashioned? I began to wonder if I was the only person on the planet not beavering away at an online travel diary of my own.
What’s so unusual, then, about the future king of England wanting to keep a journal of his travels? If diary-keeping was ever a rarefied activity, it certainly isn’t that now. Perhaps Prince Charles’s only eccentricity is in not wanting the whole world to read it … in wanting to keep it a little bit private.

The entry which pretty well all the papers quoted was Charles’s description of some of the Chinese officials as ‘appalling old waxworks’. It’s a wonderful image – and exactly the sort of thing one can say in private but not in public. A good diarist ought to be rude. You don’t want a diarist to be even-handed, ambivalent or circumspect. A good diary is the first draft of history: and a first draft doesn’t have to be right.

Take one of my very favourite diarists, the Elizabethan astrologer and mathematician John Dee (1527–1608). Dee spent the second half of his life on a futile and misguided quest for the key to all knowledge, which involved trying to contact a succession of angels and spirits who he believed could enlighten him. He kept an extraordinarily detailed record of these endeavours, but knowing that these ‘spirit diaries’ might incriminate him as a sorcerer if they were even found, he also went to great lengths to keep them secret. Some volumes were hidden in a chest with a secret drawer; others were concealed up his chimney; while others were buried underground. Believing that his secrets were thus safe from prying eyes, he felt able to set everything down, including some bizarre and explosive revelations about his private life.

But if it’s a diarist’s duty to record everything without fear of exposure, it’s also the duty of subsequent generations to make those secrets public. And in the case of John Dee’s spirit diaries, one of the people we need to thank was the book-collector Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631). Cotton was so determined to get hold of the diaries that he bought the field where Dee was said to have buried them, and proceeded to dig them up. These diaries – and other volumes which have continued to come to light over the centuries – have totally altered history’s perception of a man who, in his lifetime, strove so hard to present a favourable image of himself and his work.

In fact John Dee is an especially interesting diarist for a whole range of reasons. In Tudor times, keeping a diary of any sort was a highly unusual thing to do; and in addition to his spirit diaries, he also kept a more wide-ranging diary of daily events, jotting down entries in the margins of almanacs alongside the printed data on the planetary configurations for each day. In this way, he hoped to discover exactly what influence the stars and planets had on worldly occurrences. He was one of the first people to believe that a diary could reveal a pattern, order and meaning in apparently random events: an aim shared, though generally for very different reasons, by countless diarists right down to the present day.

(Page last updated: 3 April 2008)

Edward Fenton has edited two volumes of diaries for Day Books: The Diaries of John Dee and A Brief Jolly Change. He is the editor of The Oxford Writer, and a consultant for the Writers’ Workshop.

Day Books publishes some of the diaries featured on this page, and I wish we could publish all of them ... but unfortunately we don't! So, for anyone looking for details, a great place to start is Christopher Handley's multi-volume Bibliography of Diaries Printed in English. The latest version of this monumental work is only available in hard-copy format, but a slightly less recent version is available online at www.diarysearch.co.uk