The publication of the complete extant diary of Heinrich Witt marks a long-awaited event of major importance in the world of Latin American autobiographical literature. Witt (1799–1892), born in the then Danish city of Altona (today part of Hamburg, Germany), was an ethnically German merchant who lived in Peru from 1824 until his death in 1892, interrupted by several long sojourns back in Europe. He began keeping a diary in English when he went out to Peru as an employee of the London merchant house of Gibbs Crawley and Co. in 1824, and kept writing until near his death. This is the largest Latin American autobiographical work published to date. But its importance goes well beyond its size: it is uncommonly rich across a wide array of themes and dimensions, from forms of sociability in diverse bourgeois, middle- and upper-class settings in Peru, Germany and England, to the changing modes of travel, to detailed economic reports about mining, agriculture, commerce and finance, to the arts, military issues and technologies, politics and its scandals and follies, issues of gender and race, and myriads of at times enlightening, at times uncommonly frank comments on a vast number of Witt's acquaintances and friends, many of whom are well known to historians of nineteenth-century South America (the index contains references to over 11,000 persons!). Some of these acerbic personal comments, potentially damaging to kin and friendship ties long after the deaths of their targets, are presumably one of the reasons why Witt's descendants in Peru, the Garland family, were reluctant to have the diary published, although there is evidence that Witt had hoped that it would appear in print.

The internal structure of these texts is complex. What we have are not the original diaries but later transcriptions, editions and comments on those original texts. In 1859, aged 60, suffering from progressive loss of eyesight, Witt began to employ secretaries (usually native English speakers) for the purpose of transcribing old and writing down new texts, based on the original diaries and notes, according to Witt's dictation. Yet for this new work he maintained the diary format, with entries for one or two days or at most an entire week. Diary entries for earlier dates frequently include comments from the 1860s or 1870s – the present time of the work of editing the original texts – regarding the subsequent fate of a person, institution or business mentioned in the original text. These can be quite revealing, as when Witt originally in the 1840s had characterised someone as honest and reliable, but in the transcriptions from the 1870s added that this person had later turned out to be a scoundrel. We thus get a complex text that in many instances may have lost the immediacy of a diary in the narrow sense, but still reflects Witt's authorial voice from the time of the original annotation, combined with his later reflections and conscious editorialising that show his intent to see this text published after his death. His style is mostly pithy, conveying factual information in brief remarks. His personal opinions, and longer disquisitions, form much the smaller part of his work, even though they add greatly to its value for us.

Witt grew up in a patrician merchant family in Altona that fell on hard times during the Napoleonic wars and the French occupation of nearby Hamburg. Relatives and friends belonged to both cities’ mercantile and professional bourgeoisie, and Witt kept these networks active throughout his life. After a rigorous liberal arts education, he entered into apprenticeship with a leading merchant house in Altona that later helped him find employment in London. Here he worked for several years at Gibbs Crawley and Co., and it was this house that sent him as a commercial clerk to their office in Peru. He stayed with Gibbs for over 20 years, working in both their Arequipa and Lima offices, and becoming one of Gibbs’ leading agents on the West coast of South America. But he was never made head of the Lima office, a circumstance that may have motivated him to leave the company in 1848. He later regretted that decision since Gibbs became especially profitable during the following decade due to its hegemonic position in Peru's guano trade. From that point, Witt conducted business on his own account, importing European goods to Peru, equipping commercial expeditions to Shanghai and San Francisco through his son Juan, and working as a money-lender to immigrant and native Peruvian businessmen. During the 1860s, he and a partner held the Peruvian government's guano consignment contract for Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, and Witt served on the boards of most newly founded stockholding companies in Lima (banks, insurance, railway and utility companies). In short, although he frequently complained about his lack of means, he clearly had arrived at the apex of Peru's business community.

In 1831, Witt married the elite Arequipeña Maria Sierra, already twice widowed, and mother of three children. Witt had no biological children of his own with her, but adopted her children, and fully assumed his role of father. Two of the children eventually settled in Europe, while the youngest, Enriquita, stayed in Lima and there married the British merchant Gerald Garland, with whom she had nine surviving children. Some of his Garland grandsons became noted businessmen, politicians and publicists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His diary leaves no doubt about his deep love for his wife ‘Mariquita’; after her death in 1876, he religiously visited the ‘chapel’ he had built for her and himself in the Panteón every week to place fresh flowers on her grave. In his old age he shared his house in Lima and his rancho in Chorrillos with the Garland family and took a personal interest in the education of his grandchildren. While in many ways Witt had become a Peruvian, fully adopting many of the country's social customs, and showing a genuine interest in its progress, he always maintained a certain reserve about the viability of bourgeois life in this country, so distant from his north European roots. Thus in the shock of first learning of the assassination of former president Manuel Pardo in November 1878, he said to his daughter Enriquita, ‘now is the time to leave the country’ (vol. 8: p. 544). In late 1880 and early 1881, when the Chilean troops were closing in on Lima, the Witt-Garland family made serious preparations to remove themselves to Europe (vol. 9: pp. 244–7), a plan never carried out. This loss of faith in the family's prospects in Peru was closely linked to the losses Witt had sustained in business since about 1875.

Witt knew personally all of Peru's presidents (and quite a few from neighbouring republics), from Antonio Gutiérrez de La Fuente and Ramón Castilla to Mariano Ignacio Prado and Nicolás de Piérola; he was routinely invited to events at the presidential palace (often in his function as Danish Consul General), and entertained some of them at his own home. He liked Andrés de Santa Cruz, Castilla and Pardo, and intensely disliked – not to say loathed – José Rufino Echenique, Prado and Piérola. He called himself conservative (1844, vol. 3: p. 454), yet it is not easy to pinpoint precisely what he meant by that. Given his business, he clearly was a liberal on economic issues, and he saw conflict between orthodox Catholicism and progress (vol. 8: 357) as inevitable. His conservatism is most apparent in his views on the social order: although he freely acknowledged intelligence and achievement in individuals whatever their gender or socio-ethnic background, he clearly was most comfortable with an order in which white males dominated public and private affairs, and in which women, white plebeians, Indians and Blacks recognised the lower stations society had assigned to them.

The themes and topics into which this fascinating work offers insights cover the whole gamut of social, political, economic, military, technological and cultural affairs during much of the nineteenth century, always from a bourgeois middle- to upper-class perspective. But the strongest impressions I took away from reading this work concern the highly ritualised customs of polite society, in Lima as much as in Europe. Witt minutely recorded dinner arrangements for literally hundreds of soirees, including who was sitting next to whom, how conversations were carried on, and how decent or not the food and the behaviour of servants was. By the late 1860s and 1870s, rocambor – a card game of Spanish origin hugely popular among Peruvian and foreign elites – was played at one or more tables every night at Witt's home, normally hosted by his son-in-law Gerald Garland, and Witt would comment on how numerous and illustrious attendance had been. And at weekends Witt would spend a good part of his mornings in making brief formal visits to many friends and acquaintances (as many as ten per day), all vital activities to keep up the crucial network of friends from the political, the judicial and the business worlds. This polite bourgeois networking was the local component of an impressive international network of business friends and associates that literally spanned all continents (although it focused on the Americas and Europe). It goes without saying that economic and business historians will find in these pages an unusual wealth of figures on exchange rates, rates of discount on letters of exchange, prices, market conditions, and investments in mining, agriculture and infrastructure.

The editor Ulrich Mücke and his assistant Dr. Christa Wetzel, who wrote her dissertation on Witt and his work, have done an excellent job in editing this complex manuscript source. They dedicate nearly 200 pages of the first volume to a biography of the author, an essay on how the work fits into nineteenth-century ego literature, and the history of the manuscript and editorial conventions. In the transcriptions from the manuscript source a certain number of typos has crept in, some due to the fact that the transcribers do not appear to have been native English speakers. There are many instances in the original manuscript where a letter, a word or a string of words is missing, and the editors wisely choose to indicate these lacunae without attempting to fill them in. But these are minor irritations in what is a richly rewarding reading experience of a superbly edited text. Witt should become a household name for those of us working on nineteenth-century Latin America.