contrasts

This page considers offline diaries and professional journals as points of reference for blogging.

It covers -

• introduction
• acts of creation
• portraits of power
• the social whirl
• worms' eye views
• exploration
• fictive
• anthologies

     introduction

Preceding pages have considered online journals and other blogs, including hyperbole that blogging brings people "in touch" with themselves (a process that is claimed as somehow distinct from writing for the 'desk drawer') or creates works of cultural significance that are quite different to writing offline (particular writing only for the author's view rather than for a million random gawkers).

Points of reference are provided by diaries written before the advent of the net, either on a purely personal basis or with some expectation that they might eventually be seen and even published by someone other than the author's personal circle.

Some of those diaries are of enduring literary merit, testify to human experience with an immediacy not found in official publications or journalism, or simply provide a postcard from the past ... "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking"

     acts of creation

Diaries by artists and authors include -

• Eugene Delacroix - Painter of Passion: The Journal of Eugene Delacroix (London: Folio) edited by Lucy Norton - accessible edition of the great painter's diary
• Robert Musil - Diaries (New York: Basic Books 1998) edited by Mark Mirsky - writing by the contemporary of Mann and Kafka
• George Eliot - The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1998) edited by Margaret Harris & Judith Johnston - seriousness and sensitivity from the author of Daniel Deronda and The Mill on the Floss
• Albert Camus - Carnets, 1942-1951: Camus' diary and working notebooks (London: Hamilton 1966) edited by Philip Thody
• Marina Tsvetaeva - Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2002) edited by Jamey Gambrell
• Frances Partridge - Diaries, 1939-1972 (London: Phoenix 2000)
• Dora Carrington - Carrington: Letters and Selections from Her Diaries (London: Cape 1971) edited by David Garnett
• Franz Kafka - The Diaries of Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken 1988) edited by Max Brod
• Cesare Pavese - This Business of Living: Diaries, 1935-1950 (London: Quartet 1980) edited by A E Murch - perceptive, epigrammatic, stoic
• Andre Gide - Journals 1889-1949 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967) edited by Justin O'Brien and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle Secret Journal and other writings (Cambridge: Rivers Press 1973) edited by Alastair Hamilton
• Evelyn Waugh - The Diaries of Eveyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1976) edited by Michael Davie
• Virginia Woolf - The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: Chatto & Windus 1977-84) edited by Ann Bell - arguably Woolf's greatest work
• Walter Benjamin - Moscow Diary (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986) edited by Gary Smith
• Thomas Mann - Diaries 1918-1939 (London: Deutsch 1983) edited by Richard Winston
• George Orwell - The complete works of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg 1998) edited by Peter Davison - includes multiple volumes of Orwell's lapidary diaries
• Cosima Wagner - Diaries, 1869-1883, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt Brace 1980) edited by Geoffrey Skelton, Martin Gregor-Dellin & Dietrich Mack and Richard Wagner - The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book, 1865-1882 (London: Gollancz 1980) edited by Joachim Bergfeld - spleen and self-absorption
• Paul Klee - The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918 (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1968) edited by Felix Klee
• Ford Madox Brown - The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (London: 1981) edited by Virginia Surtees - a sideways view of the PreRaphaelites
• Sofia Tolstoy - The Diary of Sofia Tolstoy (London: Cape 1985) edited by OA Golinenko et al and Leo Tolstoy - Tolstoy’s Diaries, 1847-1910, 2 vols (London: Athlone Press 1985) edited by R F Christian - his & her hysteria
• Christopher Isherwood - Diaries, 1939-1960 (London: Chatto & Windus 1997) edited by Katherine Bucknell - life after 'I am a camera' in thirties Berlin
• Nettie Palmer - Nettie Palmer: her private journal Fourteen Years, poems, review and literary essays (St Lucia: Uni of Queensland Press 1988) edited by Vivian Smith
• Joe Orton - The Orton Diaries (London: Methuen 1986) edited by John Lahr - 'Prick up your ears' in the swinging sixties
• Anthony Powell - Journals, 1982-1992, 3 vols (London: Heinemann 1995-1997)
• Alice James - The Diary Of Alice James (Boston: Northeastern Uni Press 1999) edited by Leon Edel - moving account by the sister of William and Henry
• John Ruskin - The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin, together with Selected Related Letters and Sketches (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1971) edited by Helen Viljoen
• Edmund Wilson - The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux 1975) - first volume in series edited by Leon Edel & Lewis Dabney - preeminent US literary critic covering The Thirties, Forties, Fifties and Sixties
• Giacomo Meyerbeer - The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1811-1864, 4 vols (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni Press 1999-2004) edited by Robert Letellier
• Alan Bennett - Untold Stories (London: Faber 2005 - features his diary for 1996-2004
• Dawn Powell - The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965 (South Royalton: Steerforth Press 1995) edited by Tim Page
• John Dos Passos - The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (Boston: Gambit 1973) edited by Townsend Ludington - selections from a friend of Edmund Wilson
• Søren Kierkegaard - Journals and Papers, 7 vols (Indiana Uni Press 1967-78) edited by H V & Edna Hong
• Donald Friend - The Diaries of Donald Friend, 4 vols (Canberra: NLA 2001-6) edited by Anne Gray & Paul Hetherington
• Sergei Prokofiev - Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1907-1914 - Prodigious Youth (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2006) edited by Anthony Phillips, Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries (1915-1922) - Behind the Mask (London: Faber 2008) edited by Anthony Phillips and Soviet Diary 1927 And Other Writings (Boston: Northeastern Uni Press 1991) edited by Christopher Palmer
• Kenneth Tynan - The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (New York: Bloomsbury 2001) edited by John Lahr
• Alec Guinness - My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (London: Penguin 1997) - snippets for publication in the Spectator

     portraits of power

Perspectives on power by politicians, officials and bystanders include -

• Gathorne Hardy - The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, Later Lord Cranbrook, 1866-1892 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981) edited by Nancy Johnson and The Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton: 1885-1906, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1972) edited by Dudley Bahlman
• John Adams - Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 1755-1804, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1961) edited by L. H. Butterfield, Leonard Faber & Wendell Garrett
• Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen - Diary of A Man in Despair (London: Duckworth 2000) edited by Paul Rubens and Viktor Klemperer's I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End and The Lesser Evil (1959) (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999-2003)
• Mihail Sebastian - Journal,1935-1944 (London: Heinemann 2000) edited by Patrick Camiller - a Rumanian counterpart of Klemperer
• Volet Bonham Carter - Daring To Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1946-1965 (London: Cape ) edited by Mark Potter
• William Gladstone - The Gladstone Diaries - 1825-1896, 14 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1968-1994) edited by MRD Foot & HCG Matthew - jottings over 70 years by the Victorian Prime Minister
• Salmon Chase - Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York: 1954) edited by David Donald
• Friedrich Von Holstein - The Holstein Diaries: The Memoirs, Diaries And Correspondence Of Friedrich Von Holstein, 1837-1909, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1961) edited by Norman Rich - notes by the eminence grise
• Walther Rathenau - Walther Rathenau ~ Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual & Politician: Notes & Diaries 1907-1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985) edited by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
• Richard Crossman - Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 3 vols (London: Cape 1975-77) and The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (London: Cape 1981) - diaries at the centre of the political memoirs storm
• Alastair Campbell - The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries (London: Arrow 2007) edited by Richard Stott
• Neal Blewett - A Cabinet Diary: a personal record of the first Keating government 1991-93 (Adelaide: Wakefield Press 1999), and Peter Howson The Howson Diaries: The Life of Politics (Ringwood: Viking 1984)
• Tony Benn - Diaries, 1940-2007, 8 vols (London: Hutchinson -2007), Barbara Castle The Castle Diaries 1964-70 and The Castle Diaries 1974-76 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1980-84) and Clyde Cameron The Cameron Diaries (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1990) - spleen and selfrighteousness
• Mark Latham - The Latham Diaries (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 2005)
• Robert Menzies - Dark and Hurrying Days: Menzies' 1941 Diary (Canberra: NLA 1993) edited by A. W. Martin & Patsy Hardy and Richard Casey Australian Foreign Minister: The Diaries of R.G. Casey, 1951-60 (London: Collins 1973)
• Jakob Walter - The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier (New York: Penguin 1993) edited by Marc Raeff - sobeing account of the retreat from Moscow
• Josephus Daniels - The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913-1921 (Lincoln: Uni of Nebraska Press 1963) edited by David Cronon - watching Woodrow Wilson and young FDR
• John Colville - The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939-1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1985), Hugh Dalton The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940-1943 (London: Cape 1986) edited by Ben Pimlott and Oliver Harvey The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1941-1945 (London: Collins 1978) edited by John Harvey
• Harold Macmillan - The Macmillan Diaries 1950-1957 (London, Macmillan 2003) edited by Peter Catterall - sparkle sadly missing from the Great Entertainer's anodyne memoirs
• Harold Ickes - The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes (New York: Simon & Schuster 1954)
• Nina Lugovskaya - The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932-37 (New York: Doubleday 2007) edited by Joanne Turnbull - a view from the arbat in the era of the Great Terror - and Ivan Bunin Cursed Days, A Diary of the Revolution (Chicago: Dee 1998) edited by Thomas Marullo.
• Marie Vassiltchikov - Berlin Diaries, 1940-45 (New York: Knopf 1987) - a resister's perspective on high society in the Nazi capital
• Duff Cooper - The Duff Cooper Diaries: 1915-1951 (London: Phoenix 2006) edited by John Norwich
• Alexander Cadogan - The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938-1945 (London: Cassell 1971) edited by David Dilks and Alan Brooke Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 1939-1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2001) edited by Alex Danchev & Daniel Todman
• Henry Wallace - The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1973) edited by John Morton Blum
• Ronald Reagan - The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins 2007) edited by Douglas Brinkley - the lights were on but no one was home?

Diaries of journalists and magnates include -

• Charles Scott - The Political Diaries of CP Scott, 1911-1928 (London: Collins 1970) edited by Trevor Wilson - comment from 'Scott of the Guardian'
• Charles Reith - The Reith Diaries (London: Collins 1975) edited by Charles Stuart - shrill self-pity from the BBC and BOAC czar
• Drew Pearson - Drew Pearson Diaries, 1949-1959 (New York: Holt Rinehart 1974) edited by Tyler Abell
• Cyrus L Sulzberger - A long row of candles : memoirs and diaries, 1934-1954 (New York: Macmillan 1969)
• Piers Morgan - The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade (London: Ebury 2005) - tabloidville
• Cecil Harmsworth King - The Cecil King Diary, 1965-1974, 2 vols (London: Cape 1972-75) - Reithian tomes from UK newspaper magnate who thought he should be (or was) runnning the country
• Malcolm Muggeridge - Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (London: Collins 1981) edited by John Bright-Holmes
• William Shirer - Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-41 (London: Penguin 1979)

     the social whirl

Accounts of society include -

• Arthur Schlesinger Jr - Journals: 1952-2000 (New York: Penguin 2007) - an historian's account of the great, good or merely glittering
• Leo Lerman - The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman (New York: Knopf 2007) - Vogue, Vanity Fair and international cafe society
• Andy Warhol - The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Random 1991) edited by Pat Hackett - as inane as his art; a model for the 'I ate a cheese sandwich' bloggers
• Henry Channon - 'Chips': The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996) edited by Robert Rhodes James - chatter from the snob who danced with the man who danced with the Prince of Wales
• Noel Coward - The Noel Coward Diaries (London: Macmillan 1982) edited by Graham Payn & Sheridan Morley
• Thomas Blaikie - Diary of a Scotch gardener at the French court at the end of the eighteenth century (London: Routledge 1931) edited by Francis Birrell
• Charles Greville - The Diaries of Charles Greville (London: Pimlico 2006) edited by Edward Pearce
• Roy Strong - The Roy Strong Diaries, 1967-1987 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1997)
• Cecil Beaton - The Unexpurgated Beaton, The Cecil Beaton Diaries as they were written (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2002) edited by Hugo Vickers

     worms' eye views

Works by people who are now best known as diarists include -

• The Journal of a Disappointed Man by WNP Barbellion aka Bruce Cummings
• Samuel Pepys - The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols (London: George Bell 1970-1983) edited by Robert Latham & William Matthews
• Alan Clark - Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1994-2002) edited by Ion Trewin - spirited account from the Thatcher acolyte and self-styled cad, with more tingle than Woodrow Wyatt (aka Lord Toad of Tote Hall) - The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, 3 vols (London: Macmillan -2000) edited by Sarah Curtis
• Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, 3 vols (New York: Atheneum 1967-68) edited by Nigel Nicolson - selection from the self-regarding journal of Mr Vita Sackville-West
• James Lees-Milne - Diaries, 10 vols (London: Murray 1975-2005) - charming, crotchety performance by a custodian of the English upper classes
• Hannah Cullwick - The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 1984) edited by Liz Stanley - life below stairs
• Ralph Josselin - The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1991) edited by Alan Macfarlane
• Marino Sanudo - Cit Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2007) edited by Patricia Labalme
• John Byng - The Torrington Diaries, 1781 to 1794, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Spottswoode, 1934-38) edited by Cyril Bruyn Andrews - major Georgian travel diary
• Buonaccorso Pitti - Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati (New York: Harper & Row 1975) edited by by Gene Brucker
• Michael Wigglesworth - The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657 (New York: Harper & Row 1965) edited by Edmund Morgan
• Harry Kessler - The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan: Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971)
• Iurii Got’e - Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1988) edited by Terence Emmons
• Fanny Burney - Diary of Fanny Burney (London: Dent 1971) edited by Lewis Gibbs
• George Templeton Strong - Diary, 1835-1875, 4 vols (New York: Macmillan 1952) edited by Allan Nevins & Milton Thomas
• Marie Bashkirtseff - I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff (New York: Chronicle 1997) edited by Phyllis Kernberger - fin de siecle precursor of the emo blog
• Denton Welch - The Journals of Denton Welch (London: Hamish Hamilton 1952) edited by Jocelyn Brooks
• James Woodforde - The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1981) edited by John Beresford
• Arthur Crew Inman - The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1985) edited by Daniel Aaron - distillation of the mammoth diary by a Bostonian
• Beatrice Webb - The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, 1873-1943, 4 vols (London: Virago 1982-1985) edited by Norman & Jeanne MacKenzie - dehydrated comments from a mother of 'the nanny state'. There is more humanity in Beatrix Potter - The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881-1897 (London: Frederick Warne 1966) edited by Margaret Lane
• Kiyosawa Kiyoshi - A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2008) edited by Eugene Soviak

     exploration

• James Cook - The Journals of Captain James Cook. The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press for the Hakluyt Society 1955) edited by John Beaglehole - definitive edition of the journal kept by the remarkable mariner

     fictive

Concoctions such the 'Hitler' diaries, 'Mussolini' diaries, William Pierce's racist The Turner Diaries (1978) and Edmund Backhouse's The Diary of His Excellency Ching-shan (1910) are discussed here.

More benign fictions include the supposed diary of Jack the Ripper, Peterley Harvest: The Private Diary of David Peterley (London: Secker & Warburg 1985) edited by Michael Holroyd, The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith (1892), The Whispering Gallery: Leaves from a Diplomat's Diary (London: Phoenix 2000) by Hesketh Pearson, Magdalene King-Hall's The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3⁄4 (London: Penguin 1982) by Sue Townsend, Bridget Jones' Diaries (London: Penguin 1996) by Helen Fielding and The Complete Yes Minister: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by the Right Hon. James Hacker MP (London: BBC Books 1988) by Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay.

     anthologies

Collections and discussions include

• The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (Canongate 2003) edited by Alan Taylor & Irene Taylor
• The Faber Book of Diaries (London: Faber 1987) edited by Simon Brett
• Spaces in her day: Australian Women's Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1995) by Katie Holmes
• Sailing to Australia: shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 1995) by Andrew Hassam
• Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press 1995) edited by Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya & Thomas Lahusen.
  

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