In recent years, the diary of the private citizen has emerged as a fertile source for both academic and popular historians. Diaries bring together a range of academic interests in cultural and social history: the development of modern ideas of selfhood; the recovery of overlooked or marginalized lives (particularly those of women, who have often been diligent diarists); and the history of everyday, domestic and private life. Among popular historians, Juliet Gardiner, Virginia Nicholson, David Kynaston, and others have made extensive use of the diaries of ordinary British citizens of the last century in a new kind of “intimate history” of the recent past, full of vivid detail and human interest, inspired by a sense, in Nicholson's words, that “the personal and idiosyncratic reveal more about the past than the generic and comprehensive.”Footnote ¹ Anthologies of twentieth-century British diaries, particularly those centered on the Second World War and the period of postwar austerity, have proliferated in recent years and several have been bestsellers. Many have titles—London Was Ours, Our Hidden Lives, We Are at War, We Shall Never Surrender, Our Longest Days, Millions Like Us—that suggest that these private reflections have somehow become repositories of collective memory.Footnote ²

In this article I seek to contextualize and critique this growth of interest in twentieth-century diaries. I begin by tracing a history of British diary keeping in the first part of the century and explore some of the ways in which this activity was characterized and encouraged by newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists, and social organizations such as Mass Observation (MO). I argue that, in a key period between the 1920s and the 1950s, diary keeping came to be imagined as one way of making sense of changing notions of the self, individual privacy and the value of ordinary life, and that it was accompanied by daily rituals and material practices that were seen as rich and meaningful in themselves. I go on to explore the more recent ways in which private diaries from this period have been seen as especially compelling forms of historical evidence, in online and physical archives and in popular histories and representations; and I discuss some of the more organized and carefully curated attempts at mass diary writing, such as the revived Mass Observation project inaugurated in 1981, which have grown out of this greater awareness of the historical value of diaries and life writing. I suggest that private diaries are a valuable resource for twentieth-century historians despite or even because of the interpretative challenges they present, because these inherently opaque texts can both elucidate and usefully complicate our understanding of the wider social and cultural histories of which they form a part.

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The exact extent of diary keeping, an inherently private and often clandestine activity, may always remain unknown. Diaries are part of that vast amount of unpublished, mostly handwritten writing by ordinary people, most of which will never be made public but that we can assume must have proliferated in the last hundred years or so as literacy rates have risen. The circumstantial evidence does suggest that, in the first half of the last century, increasing numbers of British people from a wide social range began to keep diaries. One indication is that sales of diaries rose as the century progressed—in 1900, the leading firm, Charles Letts, sold just under a quarter of a million diaries a year, and by 1936 this had risen to three million—although of course, not all diary keepers wrote in these commercially produced diaries, and many who bought them kept them simply for appointments.Footnote ³

In the interwar years, radio broadcasts and popular newspapers also often discussed the art and purpose of diary writing, advising their readerships and audiences about its art, purpose, and etiquette. A recurring motif in these discussions was the extent to which an ordinary, private life might (or might not) be worthwhile and interesting enough to record. “If we do not move among the great, if we have no opportunities of treading behind the scenes, if we meet only ordinary people, is a diary worth keeping?” inquired one newspaper leader rhetorically.Footnote ⁴ “When a man comes before the Recording Angel it isn't going to be the sins that he has committed that will worry him; it will be the utter futility of the way he spent his days,” concluded another.Footnote ⁵ A Daily Mail columnist confidently told his readers that “what you have for dinner to-day will certainly not interest you in six months' time.”Footnote ⁶

Others, though, insisted that these mundane details were precisely what a diary should concern itself with, that it was a “horrible and shameful admission” that we let our lives “pass into oblivion without a word or a sign.”Footnote ⁷ One 1926 editorial suggested that a diary's value lay in the fact that it required no sense of proportion: a new hat or an amusing actress might “sweep all the armies and potentates of Europe over your margin into nothingness and oblivion.”Footnote ⁸ In a 1930 Daily Mail article titled “One Way to Immortality,” Evelyn Waugh argued that “nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years.”Footnote ⁹ The popular novelist Clemence Dane wrote in 1933, “It seems odd that we should have so poor a memory of our passionate forgotten selves. Our lives are serial novels, but we have mislaid the back numbers.”Footnote ¹⁰ The lives of “ordinary people” (according to Raphael Samuel this phrase was a coinage of the interwar years, at least in its normative mode to mean the decent, unremarkable majority of the population) were becoming more visible in an age of mass democratization and mass literacy.Footnote ¹¹ But there was still some uncertainty about whether their lives were noteworthy and whether it was even self-indulgent to write about a life that had no contact with public events or important people.

The Labour MP and peace campaigner Arthur Ponsonby, who in the interwar years published several popular annotated anthologies of British diarists as well as biographies of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, and who often spoke on BBC radio about diaries, was a great proselytizer for the idea that ordinary lives were worth recording. Ponsonby argued that private citizens' diaries were “human documents of peculiar interest” and potentially more valuable than those of eminent people, because they allowed us to “enter into the trivial pleasures and petty miseries of daily life—the rainy day, the blunt razor, the new suit, the domestic quarrel, the bad night, the twinge of toothache, the fall from a horse.” In Ponsonby's writings on diaries, it is also possible to detect a post-First World War shift in attitudes to privacy. He dismissed the still common charge that reading diaries not intended for publication was prying into private affairs, “spying out chambers of the soul we have no business to enter.” The absence of an injunction to destroy a diary, he argued, “implied on the part of the diarist a perhaps unexpressed but nevertheless not unabsent expectation that what he or she wrote might one day be read.”Footnote ¹² He was also critical of editors of posthumously published diaries who omitted details that might shock the reader: “The fetish of discretion can easily be carried too far. The next generation, I feel sure, are not going to be so squeamish. They will turn us all inside out, and chuckle as they do it.”Footnote ¹³

Ponsonby explicitly intended his anthologies and broadcasts to encourage the potential diary writer, believing that keeping a diary was “within the reach of every human being who put pen to paper.”Footnote ¹⁴ He had the idea for his first anthology of diaries after reading W. N. P. Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man and A Last Diary—“the publishing sensations of 1919 and 1920”—and the book concluded with extracts from these diaries.Footnote ¹⁵ Barbellion, the pen name of Bruce Cummings, was a previously obscure staff member in the insect room at the Natural History Museum who published the first of these books when he was still alive, although dying from a rare sclerotic disease. Cummings may have hidden behind a pseudonym and faked his own death at the end of the first volume (the subterfuge was soon discovered), but the publication of a private diary by a living person was highly unusual and his diary was peculiarly unapologetic and eloquent in its self-absorption.Footnote ¹⁶ Barbellion had, wrote Ponsonby, “revived interest in diary writing” and vindicated his own argument that “position and circumstances have nothing whatever to do with the production of a good diary.”Footnote ¹⁷

In 1931, the Western Morning News and Mercury, noting “a singular growth in the habit of keeping a diary,” wondered whether “the success of some recent books of reminiscence, based upon diary records, whetted a public appetite.”Footnote ¹⁸ A clear link between the publication of diaries and more extensive diary keeping by private citizens is naturally hard to establish, but certainly many diaries published around this time served to validate and re-enchant the routines of everyday life in ways that may have encouraged the ordinary diarist. James Woodforde's The Diary of a Country Parson was published by Oxford University Press in five volumes between 1924 and 1931; and the Victorian clergyman Francis Kilvert's diary appeared in a three-volume edition, edited by the poet and novelist William Plomer, between 1938 and 1940. Popular, fictionalized accounts of quotidian life also mimicked the diary form through their serial publication in newspapers or magazines. E. M. Delafield's partly autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), for instance, began as a series in Time & Tide in 1929 and took the form of a journal of the life of an upper middle-class woman, married with two children, living in a Devon village. Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver, which first appeared in the Times in October 1937 and in book form in 1939, was written in the third person but had the form, pace, and everyday concerns of a journal.

Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei have linked Delafield's and Struther's reclamation of daily life as an object of careful scrutiny to the diurnally themed work of modernist women writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, both prolific diarists. Woolf also wrote numerous reviews of published diaries, commending Pepys in one essay for writing about “all the infinite curiosities, amusements, and pettinesses of average human life.”Footnote ¹⁹ A number of recent scholars of modernist literature have related its recurrent interest in the minutiae of daily life and the impressionistic moment to the new routines of urban modernity, Elizabeth Podnieks even referring to Woolf's “diaristic modernism.”Footnote ²⁰ Briganti and Mezei argue that Delafield and Struther similarly “adopted the diary form to reproduce the immediacy of daily life, redefine the heroic, and reconsider the validation of public over private space.”Footnote ²¹ Their books were affirmations of the domestic and social routines of a certain kind of upper middle-class woman's life, either lightly comic (Delafield) or lightly lyrical (Struther), and they further reinforced the sense that this sort of ordinariness was worthy of daily witness and record.

May Smith, an elementary school teacher living with her parents in Swadlincote in Derbyshire who kept a diary for the duration of the Second World War, was inspired by Delafield's Provincial Lady series in Time & Tide and, in the spring of 1940, was trying to scrape together the funds to buy a copy of one of the sequels, The Provincial Lady in Wartime. The alternately waspish and scatty tone of the Provincial Lady suffuses Smith's diary. Her reporting of some of the classic wartime myths that circulate in her area, like refugee Jews signaling to German planes during air raids, and German parachutists with folding bicycles, is classic Delafield in its skeptical, amused detachment. Smith also copied Delafield's habit of wryly capitalizing other people's reported speech to give it a fake portentousness: “My father remarked curtly No Wonder We're Not Winning the War.”Footnote ²²

Stuart Sherman has argued that the consolidation of the diary form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was related to an emergent notion of “incremental time,” a sense of the passing hours less as “elastic” than as “relentless continuity.” As the diary became a mass-marketed form in the first half of the twentieth century, its keepers similarly had a keen sense of the physical form of the diary imposing constraints on marking out one's life, of the pull between what Sherman calls “serial measure” and “signal occasions.”Footnote ²³ A key chapter of Struther's Mrs. Miniver begins on Twelfth Night, with her heroine dithering over whether to buy a beautiful new diary in green lizard-skin at the extortionate price of 7s. 6d. “An engagement book,” Mrs. Miniver believes, “is the most important of all those small adjuncts to life, that tribe of humble familiars which jog along beside one from year's end to year's end, apparently trivial, but momentous by reason of their terrible intimacy.” For Mrs. Miniver, the key consideration when choosing a diary is how much space it gives to the days—“the units which mattered most, being divided from each other by the astounding phenomenon of losing and regaining consciousness.” A fortnight of days per double page is too many, she feels; a week is just right.Footnote ²⁴

Virginia Woolf also recognized that the physical form of a diary, and how much space it gave to days, could constrain what one wrote. In Jacob's Room (1922), Clara Durrant begins writing a diary entry about Jacob Flanders, “but Mr Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women!”Footnote ²⁵ Woolf saw her own diary as a physical object, a “dear old red-covered book” that could offer material corroboration of her past life and the continuity of her personality in the face of both her worsening depressions and the deepening international crisis.Footnote ²⁶ “Against all laws, I am going to make this the first volume of a diary, though as ill luck has it, it is not even the first of the month. But it is the fault of practical life,” she wrote on 15 June 1929, beginning Diary 19. “I can't write any longer in books whose leaves perish. I don't know how to keep them. Here in a bound volume, the year has a chance at life. It can be stood on a shelf.”Footnote ²⁷

Woolf would often refer to the physical object of her diary in her entries, seeing the individual volumes as creating narrative beginnings and ends in her life: “One must pause to say that here a new volume starts, the third, & therefore there is every appearance of a long, though intermittent life.”Footnote ²⁸ Podnieks points out that Woolf “bought diaries that were physically appealing, and she further made them, or transformed them, into aesthetic caches.” She mostly used two kinds of book: the first medium-sized with lush marble-effect covers, the second large, floppy books which she covered with wrapping paper with striking print designs made by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press. She also had a penchant for writing in different colors of ink, her favorites being peacock blue and bright purple, and she often mentioned her fascination with different kinds of fountain pen in the diaries.Footnote ²⁹

Woolf's interest in the material culture of diary keeping was characteristic of this period. As Michèle Barrett and Peter Stallybrass argue, it has been common for historians to see handwriting and printing as distinct from each other, when in fact in our daily activities “printing and writing constantly interact” and well into the twentieth century there was an “explosion of printed forms designed for completion by hand.” Two of the twentieth century's bestselling works of print culture were the wall calendar and the diary, both of them “designed to organize and shape manuscript culture. They elicit manuscript, encouraging us to write down future meetings, past events, addresses and telephone numbers – subject always to the material space provided by the organization of the printed page.”Footnote ³⁰ The major diary manufacturers in the first half of the century—Charles Letts, Collins, T. J. and J. Smith, John Walker and Co., and Iliffe—also competed with each other to create covetable products with covers in exotic leathers like crush morocco or crocodile skin, ribbon bookmarks, stitched case edging, gilt foil corners, and marbled inside covers.Footnote ³¹ The main innovation in diary manufacture of the first half of the twentieth century, a result of growing market segmentation, was the specialist diary, an extension of the schoolgirl's and schoolboy's diaries first published at the end of the Victorian era. By the 1930s there were thousands of these specialized diaries, with Letts alone publishing over 400, aimed at scouts, guides, motorists, investors, electrical engineers, poultry keepers, wireless amateurs, gardeners, textile workers, racing pigeon owners, bowls players, ramblers, animal lovers, and many others.Footnote ³²

All the major diary firms employed teams of researchers to produce data for their preliminary pages: information about the rising and setting of the sun, the phases and eclipses of the moon, public holidays, and more random facts about the cost of a dog license or the average speed of a snail.Footnote ³³ The purpose of much of this data was ritualistic rather than instructive. For instance, many diaries still had tide tables, of vital importance to the city merchants who bought the first Letts diaries in the early nineteenth century as they awaited the arrival of ships, but mostly redundant by the twentieth century; the notices often included about law sitting and dining terms, and Oxford and Cambridge university terms, were useless to the majority of diarists; and much of the ecclesiastical information about minor feast days like Septuagesima and Quinguagesima was a residue from the religious heights of the Victorian era.Footnote ³⁴ The eight-year-old Douglas Hurd's Letts Schoolboy's diary for 1938 was

Diaries were thus conspicuously tactile objects with specific textual and visual conventions. Even those who kept their diaries in simple notebooks often gave considerable thought to the look and feel of the repository of their writings. Frank Forster, a laborer, communist and autodidact based in Saltney near Chester, who kept a diary out of his “desire to record some of my thoughts and activities so that when I am gone some one may come and read through them and see that I at least was capable of thinking of somethings that are removed from that which stinks in the nostrils,” wrote throughout the 1930s in identical “Canadian Tablet” reporter's notebooks, all purchased from the same stationers.Footnote ³⁶ Catherine Feely points out that when, because of rationing and paper shortages, Forster had to write his 1940s diaries in notebooks of varying makes and sizes, it was a source of great irritation to him.Footnote ³⁷ Walter Musto, a civil servant in the General Stores Department of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at Millbank, filled eleven notebooks from the bespoke academic stationers Philip & Tacey of London's “Orient” series with his diary, written between 1939 and 1945. This choice fit the neat and fastidious person, with a love of small pleasures, who emerges from his diaries.Footnote ³⁸ Others, like Clara Milburn, a diarist based in Balsall Common near Coventry, augmented the exercise books in which they kept their diaries with drawings and pasted-in newspaper cuttings, telegrams, and letters.Footnote ³⁹ It seems that, for those who kept diaries in these years, the palpability of the traces of a life were an important part of the ritual of diary keeping.

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The social research organization Mass Observation—and its energetic promotion on radio and in newspapers by its founders, particularly Tom Harrisson—did much to point to the value and significance of diary keeping by private citizens from the late 1930s onwards. On 12 February 1937, less than a fortnight after a letter appeared in the New Statesman announcing the project, thirty volunteers kept the first “day surveys.” These surveys were repeated monthly on the same day until the following January, by which time nearly 600 people were participating.Footnote ⁴⁰ Two of Mass Observation's founding members, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, saw these day surveys as the most important part of the organization's work: the dust jacket cover of its first book, Mass-Observation, designed by Jennings, consisted of photographed extracts from the day surveys describing the morning weather.Footnote ⁴¹

The day survey had conflicting purposes, a product of the sometimes conflicting aims of the organization's founders and the project as a whole. Mass Observation archivist Dorothy Sheridan usefully summarizes these as “its collapsing of categories between the expert and the non-expert.”Footnote ⁴² The day survey was inspired in some sense, like the rest of MO's work, by the idea that the unconscious fears, fantasies, and wishful thinking of the population might be psychoanalytically and anthropologically deciphered: May the Twelfth, MO's book about the 1937 coronation, precedes a section dealing with a normal day survey for March the 12th with a quotation from Pavlov about habits being “nothing but a long chain of conditioned reflexes.”Footnote ⁴³ The focus on a single day was intended as a means of tapping into the diasporic forms of community in mass society and culture, and the way that events like the Coronation might unify social consciousness around a single theme.Footnote ⁴⁴ This was reflected in the form of the day survey, which was mostly a freeform diary but with often quite detailed instructions given about what to include, such as the state of the diarist's general health, striking dreams they may have had, and the weather, so there would be some unity in the responses. But the motive behind the day surveys was also democratic and egalitarian, aimed at making these ordinary citizens' lives better known to the people who governed them, at a time when there were few systematic attempts by either politicians or the press to find out the views of electors, and “ordinary people” were rarely seen or heard on film or radio. The day survey, like some of the wider discussions of diary keeping around this time, thus valued self-expression as an end in itself and suggested that each individual life was worth noticing and recording on its own terms, but combined this with a sense that this newly literate mass of people still needed guidance and direction in what they wrote.

The diarists themselves were motivated by a wide variety of impulses that did not always correspond with the organization's aims. Panel members tended to fit the profile of other diarists from this period whose writings have been unearthed. They were overwhelmingly middle class, with only about a tenth in working-class occupations. Many were members of the expanding new clerical class, that “indeterminate stratum” identified by George Orwell as “the germs of the future England”: librarians, clerks, secretaries, schoolteachers and lab technicians.Footnote ⁴⁵ The sample was also slanted towards the southeast and nearly three-quarters of participants were unmarried.Footnote ⁴⁶ Answering the directive question “Why did you join M-O?” towards the end of 1937, panel members mentioned wanting to contribute to the social-scientific study of society or to help themselves become more observant.Footnote ⁴⁷ Much was made in MO's publicity of the organization as a kind of virtual society of public-spirited souls, a “large system of voluntary helpers” which “does not meet, has no group opinion or constitution.”Footnote ⁴⁸ To write for MO, as Robert W. Malcolmson argues, “was to participate in an intellectual community—a sort of Open University years before any such formal institution came into existence.”Footnote ⁴⁹

As Margaretta Jolly points out, the volunteers also often said that they found writing itself pleasurable: “joy in scribbling about the very things I'm always studying in life—I've done it unconsciously for ages.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Christopher Hilliard suggests that in this period aspiring writers of the working and lower-middle classes, with limited opportunities to develop their talents, latched on to organizations like MO as a way of practicing their craft and connecting with other writers and readers. But as with other avenues for aspirant writers around this time, like writer's clubs, participants often found MO an imperfect fit for their talents and interests. For the more dedicated correspondents, diary keeping seems to have soon taken on a logic and momentum of its own.Footnote ⁵¹

MO's call to its volunteers for freeform diaries just before the outbreak of war in September 1939 was a pragmatic approach to the fact that the organization was expecting to have to scale itself back in wartime. Continuous diaries could be written with nominal direction from MO and could even be kept in the writer's home should any wartime emergency interfere with the mail.Footnote ⁵² “Failing further directions being sent you,” read Charles Madge's “Crisis Directive,” printed in red ink and sent to all Mass Observers in August, “would you keep a diary for the next few weeks, keeping political discussion at a minimum, concentrating on the details of your everyday life, your own reactions and those of your family and others you meet.”Footnote ⁵³ By the end of that month, before war had even been declared, seventy people had started war diaries and another fifty-five began during September. The numbers of people sending in diaries fluctuated throughout the war and had dropped to sixty a month by the end of it. But in total, nearly five hundred kept diaries, of hugely varying lengths and frequency of submission, throughout the war, and a handful carried on until well after the war had ended.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Mass Observation diarists were different from ordinary diarists in that they had immediate readers, of a sort. In his editing of the wartime MO diary of Olivia Cockett, a New Scotland Yard payroll clerk living in Brockley, southeast London, Robert Malcolmson includes some entries from another, more intimate journal of hers. This is a useful reminder that, although the MO diaries could be frank, with Cockett freely discussing her affair with a married man, they often omitted purely personal matters, not just because they were read by other people but also because the genre of the Mass Observation diary was geared more towards reflecting on public events. After spending an idle early morning in March 1940 going on a meandering walk, feeding the birds and arriving late at the office, Cockett wrote: “Well, that morning will live as long as my memory, but I don't suppose M-O means that by ‘Diary.’”Footnote ⁵⁵ Diarists imagined MO's founders as “kindly, educated, progressive, tolerant and, above all, interested and therefore validating.”Footnote ⁵⁶ They were sometimes addressed directly by the diarists: “Never be a canvasser Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, it's the rottenest job in the world! I know!”Footnote ⁵⁷

But although they claimed to read every submission, MO's staff made limited use of them. Tom Jeffery suggests that the poor reception of May the Twelfth, which made extensive use of the day surveys, discouraged Harrisson and Madge from using the diarists too extensively in their future work.Footnote ⁵⁸ Anonymized extracts were occasionally published in the organization's monthly bulletins and in a short-lived weekly publication of 1940, Us: Mass-Observation's Weekly Intelligence Service, as well as being quoted in some of MO's book publications, particularly War Begins at Home (1940) and People in Production: An Enquiry into British War Production (1942). In February 1942, Tom Harrisson pointed out in the New Statesman that the radio program The Brains Trust was “one of the things that comes up most frequently in the diaries. . . . Few names occur more frequently in the written words of ordinary people nowadays than [C. E. M.] Joad.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In many cases, though, MO staff simply filed the diaries by month, gender, and surname. More than any part of MO's work, they fulfilled its initial mission statement that “our first concern is to collect data, not to interpret them.”Footnote ⁶⁰

In the organization's rough division of labor, Jennings and Madge had instigated the day surveys while Harrisson did fieldwork in Bolton. But in wartime, Harrisson took over the task of coordinating the diaries and other correspondence from observers. As a frequent contributor to newspapers and BBC radio, he was Mass Observation's public face, and perhaps the ideal reader the diarists imagined for their entries. He even invited London Mass Observers to phone him. Olivia Cockett took him up on this on 5 October 1939, but “he only suggested as many verbatim conversation reports as possible about the war, and I am fed up with the damn war and don't want to talk, or listen to talk, or write about it.” Carrying on a tradition begun by Madge, Harrisson also sent notes of thanks and encouragement to diarists, which Cockett appreciated, writing in her diary of 27 June 1940: “Thank you for the letter, Tom Harrisson. Hope you're right about the material being of some use. Haven't got a very strong missionary impulse, but should be heartened to think that someone, somewhere, would someday be helped somehow by something I've done.”Footnote ⁶¹ But the diaries did not interest Harrisson as much as they did Madge and Jennings as a genre in their own right and, after he was called up in 1942, he was not so involved in Mass Observation in any case. In 1944, the full-time Mass Observer Celia Fremlin tried to use the diaries as the basis for a book about the effects of war on the social role of the housewife. But she gave up because, although they provided “invaluable quotations, sidelights, etc.,” she could not “prove” anything from them.Footnote ⁶²

As Mass Observation's founders dispersed after the war, and it became a limited company specializing in market research in 1949, it still accepted diaries but did little more than file them. The explanation given by the teacher who gave up writing for MO in 1949, after keeping a diary for nine years, is revealing:

The uncertain purpose and direction of Mass Observation's diary project is partly reflected in the diary of the best known of its correspondents, the Barrow housewife Nella Last. Having dabbled with completing day surveys for MO in 1938, she began a proper diary at the start of the war, partly because the Daily Express columnist William Hickey had argued “that the Government would find MO valuable. Never can see just how, but although not clever am ‘bright’ enough to trust people who are!”Footnote ⁶⁴ (“In a war, when censorship may necessarily prevent us all from having our say publicly,” Hickey had written, “such a service might give a valuable quick check on the public's private reactions: it would supplement propaganda by showing how it was taken—a more benevolent Gestapo.”Footnote ⁶⁵) But Last's diary keeping soon became simply a matter of routine: she wrote it almost daily, usually late at night, in pencil on loose-leaf paper, and on one Friday morning each month, on his way to work, her neighbor Mr. Atkinson dropped off the parcel to Mass Observation at the post office.Footnote ⁶⁶

Last continued to send entries for the next three decades, occasionally reflecting on whether it was worth carrying on. “The thought struck me as I began my diary,” she wrote on 4 May 1945, “how much longer will they want them?”Footnote ⁶⁷ For Last, as for most of the diarists, Mass Observation was mainly a postal address: first, 6 Grote's Buildings, Blackheath, SE3; then 82 Ladbroke Road, London, W11; then 21 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1; and finally 148 Cromwell Road, London, SW7. In November 1946, on a trip to London to see her son Cliff, she visited the offices at Bloomsbury House, but does not seem to have gone in.Footnote ⁶⁸ Since many MO diarists wondered about the fate of their diaries, it was natural for them to be interested in what happened at the address that would have been so familiar to them. In April 1947, another MO diarist, Herbert Brush, was bolder than Last. As he crossed Bloomsbury Street on the way to the British Museum, he suddenly thought he “would go and see what the office of ‘Mass-Observation’ is like, as that is where my diary-letters end up.” He went up to the fifth floor and had a brief conversation with the then head of MO, H. D. (Bob) Willcock: “I questioned the use of my diaries, as they very seldom contain any interesting matter for strangers to read. However, I was told that they were all read, and if anything of interest was there it would be found and noted.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Last carried on until February 1966 when, aged seventy-six, she wrote her last diary entry, wondering if her writing was ever read and “if the need for it is past now.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Last's son, Cliff, later blamed Mass Observation for having failed to tell its longest-serving diarist how well-written and thoughtful her contributions were.Footnote ⁷¹ But giving feedback in this way was not what MO did; in providing the most minimal incentive to write—an address with the possibility that the diary might be read there—but little direction, it allowed each diarist to find his or her own voice and pace of writing, and create a body of evidence that might not have otherwise existed. The wide publicity given to Mass Observation, and its sense that the experiences of ordinary people were worth recording, may also have encouraged others to take up the diary habit.

Even leaving Mass Observation aside, the Second World War, like the First World War, seems to have led to a sharp rise in diary keeping, although sales of actual diaries fell because of paper rationing.Footnote ⁷² Uncertainty about whether one's life would continue perhaps increased the desire to record what was left of it; conscription meant that many more literate people were involved in fighting than in earlier wars; and total war determined that even civilians had their ordinary lives disrupted so that they may have seemed extraordinary and worthy of note. “You're living in days that your children will read about in their history books,” the Daily Mirror reminded its readers in 1941, advising them to keep a diary.Footnote ⁷³ Harold Nicolson regularly urged readers of his Spectator column to keep a diary, claiming that the diarist's ideal audience should be

These diary-keeping habits seem to have continued for many after the war. By the early 1950s, diary publishers reported an increase in prewar sales by more than half, one attributing this to the fact that “in a 42-hour week, everyone has time to write in a diary, and something to write in it.”Footnote ⁷⁵ There was a growing public acceptance by midcentury of the significance of ordinary experience, how this might be articulated through diary writing, and even how this information might be useful to future historians. When, in June 1952, a Mrs. Norah Arnott had her personal diary stretching back forty-eight years stolen and appealed for its return by saying that it was “of no value to anyone but me,” it was the unlikely figure of King George V's biographer, John Gore, who admonished her that “truth is the daughter of time,” and that “if diaries are punctually kept by an honest hand, they will be a gold mine to biographers and historians though they may treat largely of the day's weather or the day's bag.”Footnote ⁷⁶

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One reason why historians are now making so much use of diaries from the first half of the twentieth century, then, may simply be that there are a lot of them, and that it has taken this long for them to be discovered and sifted through, usually after the writer's death. While writers and historians in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s had begun to point to the value of the diary as a historical resource, there was little sense of how they might be valuable and little systematic attempt to archive diaries. So there is a sense of serendipitous survival about diaries from this era that adds to their romantic allure today but also presents problems of organization and interpretation. From the beginning, the MO diarists thought of the usefulness of what they were doing for posterity: Miss Atkinson, a filing clerk from Tonbridge, wrote as early as 1937 that “the studies of daily lives with every little detail should be very interesting to posterity in the way the Samuel Pepys diary is.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Madge's Crisis Directive of August 1939 explicitly made this point about the wartime diaries, that they would allow future “historians and social scientists” to make use of “a detailed, authentic record of the effects of war on the civil population.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Harrisson also assured the MO Panel in August 1940 that their diaries were “quite definitely going to prove of first class importance when the time comes to write a history of this war.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As well as promoting the private habit of diary keeping, Mass Observation could be said to have pioneered this future-oriented sense that today's ephemeral writing might be useful to later historians. But MO's own practice, particularly when directed by Harrisson, a political animal concerned with the contemporary dissemination and publicizing of the project (and himself), was simply to accumulate copious material and to publish quickly and often.

In short, the usefulness of the diaries to future historians was an idea and gesture rather than something actively fostered through MO's archival practice. The diaries were mostly unread for two decades until the late 1960s, when the historian Paul Addison discovered them, along with the rest of the archive, “all higgledy-piggledy under layers of dust,” in the basement of Mass Observation's offices in Cromwell Road, South Kensington, where it felt “like stumbling on buried treasure.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Here lay the work of hundreds of diarists who had posted hundreds of thousands of diary entries into the nation's postboxes to an unknown reader of the future, which had then survived the London blitz, several office moves, cellar floods, and attacks by mice and fungi. The state of the collection when it arrived (largely thanks to Addison and his fellow historian Angus Calder) at the University of Sussex—with old folders full of jumbled-up papers held together by rusted paperclips and broken elastic bands—shows how little thought had been given to its value as an archive up to that point.Footnote ⁸¹

In the years since Mass Observation's first incarnation ended in the 1960s, there has been a growing sense of the value of archives, a greater sensitivity to the storing of collective memories in contemporary culture, and a “grassroots revolution in historical participation” identified by Jerome de Groot, Raphael Samuel, and others.Footnote ⁸² When Mass Observation re-launched the panel of diarists in 1981, under the direction of the University of Sussex anthropologist David Pocock and the archivist Dorothy Sheridan, it retained some of the guiding aims of the original project. It had the same creative combination of restriction and shapelessness: while most contributors responded directly to suggestions and guidance from the archive about what to write about, other writers sent in personal diaries and impromptu contributions not covered by the directives.Footnote ⁸³ But there were also clear differences, inspired by a new sense of the value of recording people's lives for posterity. In keeping with a growing interest in life writing, also evident since the 1970s in the growth of feminist and oral history collectives and community-publishing initiatives (the Brighton area, where the archive was based, having a particularly rich tradition in this area, for example through the independent publisher QueenSpark Books and the radical newspaper the Brighton Voice), the new project placed more emphasis on writing for Mass Observation as a way of recording and preserving a life story.Footnote ⁸⁴

The archive's usefulness to future scholars was now seen not simply as a fortunate by-product, as it had been in MO's earlier incarnation, but as its raison d'être. This was partly because the archive had a newfound academic respectability, based in a university with funding at various points from the Leverhulme Trust and the Nuffield Foundation—so a concern with scholarly longevity began to displace the original Mass Observation project's engagement with its contemporary political and cultural moment. The volunteers who contributed to the post-1981 project were explicitly asked to address “a putative and virtual set of future historians.” As Ben Highmore notes, “this accounts for something of the temporal atmosphere that often pervades these documents: all this, the correspondents seem to be telling the reader, will have happened a long time ago.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Diaries taken from the later Mass Observation project, written with a strong sense of audience and readership, may therefore need to be read differently from the less premeditated and future-directed diaries of the earlier MO project that, alongside more conventional private diaries, present different kinds of challenge for the historian. As a body of evidence, diaries are generally hard to process as they are often very long and diverse in their subject matter, almost always handwritten, and, given that they are frequently written in haste, difficult to decipher. It is notable that, for the first thirty years of the existence of the Mass Observation Archive, diaries were its least used material. Historians focused instead on the topic collections and file reports, because these were relatively short, indexable, and (since almost all were typed, unlike the majority of the diaries) easily legible. It was not until 1991 that the archive produced a preliminary guide to the content of the diaries. It stored and still stores them together by month, which means that following a single diarist through the war might mean retrieving 150 archive boxes.Footnote ⁸⁶ With the exception of Nella Last and the writer Naomi Mitchison, it is only in the 2000s that individual MO diarists began to be published in edited collections.Footnote ⁸⁷ There have also been three bestselling anthologies of the diarists by Simon Garfield, and another by the late Sandra Koa Wing of the MO archive; and MO diarists have increasingly been included in wartime diary anthologies alongside other diarists.Footnote ⁸⁸

As a piece of evidence, the diary remains stubbornly analogue. One of the catalysts for the growing use of periodicals, newspapers, and other ephemera among historians of Britain in recent years has been the expansion of digital archives, with their electronic subversion of conventional hierarchies of textuality. By using word searches to produce “hits” across a wide range of texts, digitized archives have expanded our definition of print culture. Diaries, though, have largely been excluded from this opening up of ephemeral documents to digital access, because handwritten documents cannot (yet) be searched through the imperfect system of optical character recognition that these archives rely on. The diaries of a small number of prominent figures, such as Queen Victoria and Beatrice Webb, have been digitized, and Wigan Library and Chetham's Library in Manchester have both begun projects to digitize some of their diary collections. In most cases, though, even digitized diaries cannot be searched in the same way as digitized print archives and so remain resistant to the kind of electronic data mining that has transformed the study of ephemeral print culture.

The most extensive recent project to archive private diaries—the Great Diary Project, housed at the independent, charity-funded Bishopsgate Library in the City of London—is an attempt to address this deficiency, while making something of a virtue of the diary's irreducibility to digital form. The project was inaugurated in 2012 with Irving Finkel's gift of his private collection of about 1,500 diaries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it has since invited members of the public to augment the archive by depositing their own or their relatives' diaries in it. In newspaper articles, lectures, and media interviews, Finkel discussed his rationale for collecting diaries and his campaign to store them in a single archive. His aim, he said, was “to rescue other people's diaries from perdition,” from being “unloved, uncared for, burned, skipped, torn up or left to moulder into green lumps in cellars.”Footnote ⁸⁹ A curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, Finkel saw diaries as a “rescue corner for the human spirit” and believed that their seemingly banal subject matter would be transformed by time into significance, just as the cuneiform written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia is now charged with meaning. He indiscriminately collected every available diary, “on the basis that even one about changing the tax disc or mending the fence, if it were 400 years old, would be very interesting.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Before the collection was housed at Bishopsgate, he spoke of saving the diaries “in some fire-proofed vault for unborn readers, for whom the 20th and 21st centuries will seem distant and unreal,” or of burying thousands of them in an empty Tube station, so that someone in two hundred years would have access to the “gold dust” of social history.Footnote ⁹¹

Being able to inspect a large number of diaries in the Bishopsgate Library undoubtedly adds to our understanding of diary keeping. It allows us to see that the different functions of a diary, as a mnemonic for future appointments and as a vehicle for personal reminiscences, often overlapped; that even in this most individualistic of genres, diarists were constrained by the size and format of the diary itself, and the way it divided up days, but that they were also resourceful in commandeering sections meant for accounts or general memoranda for other purposes, such as Christmas-card lists or summings-up of the year; and that diaries were personalized by their keepers with doodles, drawings, newspaper cuttings, check stubs, postcards, pressed leaves, and bus tickets. One female diarist in her teens, writing from a private school in Cumbria in the early 1950s, treated her Letts day-a-page desk diaries as an omnium-gatherum of her life, pasting in cartoons from Ronald Searle's St. Trinian's series, slips from her teachers (“marks deducted for untidiness”), pictures of Mario Lanza and Glenn Ford, theater programs, and restaurant menus. She also included lipstick traces, stick-figure drawings of school lacrosse matches and some of her own juvenile poetry (“Lo before my downbent head / Appeared this vision—light of life”), with which she unsuccessfully tried to interest the publishers Faber and Faber.Footnote ⁹² By examining a mass of diaries at the archive, one also sees that they are all marks on a page made by a person. A pencil becomes gradually blunter until it is sharpened, ink gets slowly fainter until the cartridge is refilled, or there are furious crossings-out, double underlinings and even special announcements written in red ink (“Petrol rationing ends. 10 years of restriction over!!!”) that reflect the mood of a moment.Footnote ⁹³

En masse, as Finkel puts it, the diaries add up to a sort of “mute appeal,” a sense of the weight of numerous lives lived anonymously and mundanely but meaningfully.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is very moving to be able to witness the commitment of obscure individuals to acknowledge and record the trivial details of their lives, if only to themselves. The philosopher of communication John Durham Peters calls these kinds of texts “gifts to the dead,” arguing that they are “desperate and daring acts of dignity” precisely because they are “expressive acts occurring over distances and without immediate assurance of reply.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Since the nineteenth century, as Carolyn Steedman argues, a visit to an archive has been regarded as “a foundational and paradigmatic activity of historians,” and this “cult of the archive” has come to underpin certain historians' sense of legitimacy, most recently in arguments over postmodern history, when “social historians had turned their attention to the archive, claimed it as their very own place, in which they were more at home than any other kind of historian.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The archive combines the solid proof of intellectual labor with a more emotive sense of actively possessing and resurrecting the past. The idea of the archive as a place that preserves both an official, authoritative history and a more nebulous psychic past is exemplified in the Great Diary Project, a public entity that is entirely concerned with the personal and intimate.

As Steedman argues, any skilled historian is aware of the disparity between the archive's promise to be able to “locate, or possess that moment of origin, as the beginning of things” and the reality that what has ended up there is the “tiny flotsam” in “the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything.”Footnote ⁹⁷ But in the Great Diary Project, this sense of coming in halfway through the story, or of following a narrative that peters out without giving up its secrets, is amplified. One seventeen-year-old public schoolboy's diary for 1950 is mostly punctuated with prosaic entries (“Went to Bournemouth to get trousers etc. Very boring”) before abruptly hinting at some serious existential crisis (“I feel really unhappy, and feel that I have worried Dad and Mother which makes me worse . . . Muddle again. A terrible depression today”) before, just as abruptly and without explanation, reverting to mundanity (“my bike developed wheel wobble”).Footnote ⁹⁸ This is how private diaries often read to an outsider: serving mainly as notes to the self, they are tantalizing textual fragments that obscure as much as they explain. And since the Great Diary Project consists almost entirely of private citizens who have for the most part left little alternative trace of their existence, there is no way of piecing together the story forensically from elsewhere—a problem exacerbated by the quasi-accidental, chaotic way in which the items have come to be in the collection, after being rescued from house clearances, car boot sales, junk shops, or attics after the writer's death.

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The idea of the archive as a place that can retain both tangible textual traces and more elusive private desires is now familiar to the British public from the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? and other TV history documentaries. The rituals of exploring archives—scanning the shelving, identifying the relevant file, unloosing the archive string, turning the pages carefully with white gloves—are part of the visual connecting tissue of these programs. In Dear Diary, a 2010 BBC4 series about diaries, for instance, the comedians Rory Bremner and Victoria Wood were shown roaming the Mass Observation stacks at the University of Sussex. The moment of discovery (presumably aided by pre-production) showed Wood, who played Nella Last in her own 2006 television adaptation of the diaries, Housewife, 49, hungrily laying her hands on Last's diary, noting excitedly the embroidery cotton she had used to tie the loose sheets together and the Venus symbol to denote a woman diarist scrawled on its cover. According to other contributors to the series, diaries offered the “intimacy that you can't get enough of” and “a totally unedited, honest picture of the time,” and they filled “the hole where the history should be.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Diaries, it was assumed, were a particularly intimate form of evidence that offered a firsthand encounter with the past.

This modern sense of the diary as therapeutic truth teller was also evident in Housewife, 49. Condensed into ninety minutes, the film intensified the narrative arc of Last's wartime diaries, which show the war providing the occasion for a liberating break from her depressions and “nerves” of the 1930s, as she gains confidence from helping to run a Red Cross charity shop and learns to challenge her husband. Last writing and reading from her own diary provides the voiceover in the film, offering the viewer an access to her that is not available to the other characters—although in fact this voiceover that purports to be the diary often uses modern idioms like “I'm sad and I'm scared” and is partly an invention of Wood's. Last's husband does not understand why she writes a diary; nor do the Mass Observation staff in London who assure each other that “loonies will always write in,” who casually label her “Housewife, 49,” and who are not sure where Barrow-in-Furness is. For all his occasional old Harrovian hauteur, Tom Harrisson would never have treated the diarists so flippantly. In the film, the diary's only sympathetic reader is the viewer, who understands Last better from our supposedly more enlightened, less emotionally stifled present.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This is a starker version of how Last's diary is usually read in popular accounts: as a cathartic, self-actualizing narrative with its author, in the words of a recent Daily Mail article, as “the Original Desperate Housewife.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Virginia Nicholson calls Last's decision to write a diary for Mass Observation “the first step on the road to her recovery.”Footnote ¹⁰² It is not so much that this version of events is wrong—wives pouring hitherto unfulfilled energies into home front activities in the face of obstructive or killjoy husbands feature heavily in Dorothy Sheridan's MO diary collection, Wartime Women—but that it is only one way of reading the story. Last's surviving diary is incomplete, large parts of 1944 and 1945 being lost at some point before the archive's arrival at Sussex, which should at least give us pause before extrapolating too much from what survives. Even the diary that remains is so long it is unlikely anyone has read it all. Last's entries from the late 1950s and early 1960s, which relate her husband's worsening depression and her own declining health and growing reclusiveness, have not been published—perhaps because they cannot be shaped as easily as the wartime diaries into a redemptive narrative—and, until recently when David Kynaston cited them in his book Modernity Britain, mainly to demonstrate the effect of the arrival of television in a household ambivalent about it, were unused by historians.Footnote ¹⁰³ In any case, organizing Last's diaries into a continuous narrative is a somewhat misleading way of reading them because, like all MO diarists, she did not conceive them in this way. On 30 August 1945, she referred to the “miles” of text her diaries must now constitute, but she never saw this accumulated text herself, simply posting her entries away each month.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The relationship between the physical object of the diary and its edited, codex form is, as the French theorist of diarists Philippe Lejeune puts it, “a veritable Procrustean bed. It is like trying to make a sponge fit a matchbox.” The unedited manuscript of Last's diary—with its paratactic use of “and” or dashes to connect points, sparing use of paragraphs or punctuation and copious use of inverted commas and underlining of words—has a more extempore feel than the published diaries, suggesting something done hurriedly and intuitively late at night. What mattered most to Last seemed to be the moment of composition itself, not a notion of how these myriad entries would later link together. The diary as a form is best understood, argues Lejeune, not as a consecutive narrative but as a system of daily habits, a modus operandi. “Before becoming a text, the private diary is a practice,” he argues. “The text itself is a mere by-product, a residue. Keeping a journal is first and foremost a way of life, whose result is often obscure and does not reflect the life as an autobiographical narrative would do.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

As Jennifer Sinor points out, much of the existing research on diaries has tended to stress that they are ultimately performative texts, vehicles for identity formation and self-fashioning.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Studies of women's diaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in particular, have argued that their recording of daily life sought to “authorize self-representation,” to write into life a hidden self not constrained by patriarchal conventions, so that “a woman's diary is a self-portrait of someone who should be invisible, silent, even erased.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Judy Simons argues that, since women often shared their diaries with intimates and saw their diary keeping as of a piece with more obvious tools for self-expression such as letter writing, in these texts “the dividing line between degrees of privacy is a delicate one.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Sinor suggests that, because diaries have historically been undervalued by historians and literary critics, these scholars of diaries have often tried to justify their entry into the literary canon by showing how similar they are to more prestigious texts in their qualities of introspection, authorial presence and narrative shaping.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As Michael Roper argues, cultural history also leans naturally towards examining such constructions of identity because it focuses on what is “collectively shaped,” its subject matter being “the public narrative forms and social practices through which personal accounts are composed.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

While Last's diary certainly contains elements of a narrativized life story, much of it makes more sense if we think of it as what Sinor calls “ordinary writing,” which is process-oriented, exists in the moment, and is fundamentally bound up with the act of composition itself. Sinor suggests that this form of writing is often produced by women who, caught up in routine tasks like cooking, cleaning, or mending, have “historically and primarily experienced time as measured rather than occasioned . . . in fact the general measuredness of women's bodies, tasks, and days assures both their skill and promise at translating the experience of ‘time in’ to the page.” She argues that the ordinary diary “bears the traces of just enough recognizable narrative features in combination with just enough gaps, omissions, and general disarray to make it highly vulnerable to hyper-performative reading”—by which she means that there is a continual temptation to turn these messy, illegible, gap-ridden texts into a structured narrative, and that this temptation should be resisted.Footnote ¹¹¹ In a discussion of her Great Aunt Norah's diaries, the historian Alison Twells similarly notes that, writing in ordinary pocket diaries with space for about twenty or thirty words for each day, her style—disjointed, telegraphic sentence fragments in which verbs dominate over pronouns—left little room for narratives of personal transformation.Footnote ¹¹²

But while one should recognize that diary writing as a genre often privileges banality and routine over narrative incident, it is worth noting as well that diarists themselves are often unconventional or idiosyncratic. To write thousands of private diary entries over a long period is a rare and even contrarian act. Only a minority of the Mass Observation diarists, already an atypical group in their interest in writing about their lives, made regular contributions over a period of at least two years.Footnote ¹¹³ A fifth of MO's wartime diarists stopped after their first entry and another fifth after two to four entries.Footnote ¹¹⁴ A truly representative history told through diaries would have to include the vast, forgotten majority that did not see January out. This alternative account would tell the story of an eternal winter, populated by a tribe of initially loquacious people who suddenly become monosyllabic and then lapse irrevocably into silence. The Great Diary Project contains examples of these kinds of diaries, in which the entries become gradually more sporadic before ending with a single, gnomic entry on 28 February: “Phoned saying I had to work late. Went back to office & typed letter to George.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ More dedicated diarists are, by nature, a self-selecting and skewed sample. James Hinton points out that for all MO's rhetoric about allowing ordinary people to speak for themselves, “many of the panel members did not think of themselves as ‘ordinary.’ They tended to see themselves as unusual people, distinguished by their desire to self-fashion their lives free from the conventions of their social milieu.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ They were certainly highly unusual in one sense: they kept diaries consistently.

David Kynaston's book series on the postwar history of Britain is vivid and compelling partly because the diarists he employs extensively are not “representative”—and not only because they betray the familiar bias towards the lower-middle class, London- and home counties-based, unmarried, and middle-aged, but also because they are so often vibrant, eccentric characters with mordant or wry takes on public events. Such characters include Grace Golden, a middle-aged London-based commercial artist, lonely and depressed at her lack of commissions; Gladys Langford, a world-weary school teacher deserted by her husband in 1914, now living on her own in the Woodstock Hotel, Highbury; and Florence Speed, unmarried, in her fifties and in poor health, eking out a living writing romantic novels such as Girl Proposes (1948) and No Poster Girl (1953), and house-sharing in Brixton with her sister and brother. Kynaston's most assiduous diarists seem to have been motivated by a combination of loneliness, time free from children and spouses and, often, undemanding clerical jobs with frequent breaks, short hours, and plenty of time to write.Footnote ¹¹⁷ His accumulation of these voices has the rich texture of classic realist fiction; the postwar demi-world of cheap boarding houses, residential hotels, and urban solitariness he evokes is reminiscent of the novels of Patrick Hamilton or Norman Collins. When Gladys Langford sees Terence Rattigan's play Separate Tables in October 1954, she records tellingly that “the awful loneliness of the flotsam and jetsam in a guesthouse was only too well portrayed.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

The most absorbing character in Kynaston's books is the oddest of all: Henry St. John, an unmarried civil servant in his thirties living in the Westbourne Hotel, Bristol, before moving to London to work for the Ministry of Food. St. John is, in Kynaston's words, “a man of virtually non-existent human sympathies” for whom “the war had essentially been a personal inconvenience.” Public events impinge little on his consciousness, as he spends his days failing to buy Ovaltine at eleven successive shops, attending nude shows at London's Windmill Theatre, or returning to a public toilet to masturbate over the obscene inscriptions he had seen in one cubicle, only to find “there was no lock on the door.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ His diary entry for 6 February 1952, the day the king's death is announced, concentrates on how the cold in his head has produced “more nasal discharge,” before noting that “I never saw King George VI.” When he goes to relatives in Southall to listen to the coronation, he records only that “one log of an electric fire was switched on, but it was still cold.” It is not quite fair to say that St. John complains constantly: instead he offers, as Kynaston puts it, an “almost commentless chronicling” with no explicit emotional input at all but an always underlying tone of misanthropy.Footnote ¹²⁰ What the extracts from his diary do communicate, though, is the sense of an individual voice: a resilient consciousness, not necessarily in kilter with current events but alive and open to experience at that moment in history. Similarly, Ben Highmore has suggested that in the best writing that makes use of MO's diarists, “the particularity of respondents' quotes are never held hostage by overriding arguments: they always remain little islands of singularity, fractals of a life-world that exceed an argument.”Footnote ¹²¹

The value of the private diary as evidence is precisely that it is likely to be eccentric or tangential in this way. For the historian of Britain's recent past, there is almost a surfeit of harder, more demographically representative evidence, particularly of statistical and quantitative data accumulated through the expanded machinery of government, advances in computing, and what Mike Savage calls “the creeping rise of the social science apparatus” in the postwar years.Footnote ¹²² Since 1967, the opening up of the National Archives by the thirty-year rule (and, since 2000, by Freedom of Information legislation) has also greatly increased the amount of official documentation available to researchers. Contemporary historians have understandably wanted to draw on these rich resources as they are released, but, as the historian Stephen Brooke argues, it has meant that “our understanding of post-1945 Britain has yet to be entirely loosed from its moorings in Whitehall and Kew.”Footnote ¹²³ It is one reason, perhaps, why twentieth-century historians have still to create the thoroughly interdisciplinary accounts of the relationship between individual subjectivities and collective mentalities that have illuminated earlier periods.

Some of the techniques used by early modern historians in analyzing the much scanter evidence from that period— close reading of textual fragments, the extrapolation of historical pattern from the forensic examination of seemingly anecdotal or peripheral material—might usefully be applied to the ordinary writing by private citizens that has proliferated in the last century, for it is this kind of writing that occupies what Roper calls “the articulation points between cultural scripts and subjectivity.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The recent work of Matt Houlbrook and Claire Langhamer on Queer London and the English in love shows the rich potential of exploring this genre of private writing that occupies a liminal space between the social and subjective.Footnote ¹²⁵ Such texts “provide routes into people's affective worlds, operating as an archive of feeling,” as Langhamer puts it, but also reflect “wider structural shifts” and the complex relationship between everyday experiences and the efforts of experts and other cultural actors to define and prescribe those experiences.Footnote ¹²⁶ As Houlbrook reminds us elsewhere, in an essay on Edith Thompson's letters, “privacy is not the same as authenticity.”Footnote ¹²⁷

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In the context of twentieth-century British historiography, then, diaries can show how the collective experience of an historical moment comes up against the seeming randomness and singularity of everyday life as it is being lived. They help us to see the recent past as an era of still-to-be-decided tensions, possibilities, and contingent moments, instead of a story to which we already know the ending, with statistical agglomerations or abstract nouns like “austerity” and “affluence” substituting for the messy, convoluted experience lived by thinking, feeling selves. Diaries show us that daily lives are experienced corporeally, as a series of sensual pleasures or discomforts in the present moment. May Smith's heartfelt complaints about “the awful blaring whine” of the air raid sirens and the hard, unyielding chair she has to sit on while listening to long lectures about Combines or the profits of Vickers Armstrong, or Herbert Brush salivating in front of a still life of a pork pie “with plenty of jelly between the meat and the crust” at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in May 1947, convey with great economy that, for most people in this era, news about the second front or postwar export drives was less pressing than aching bottoms or empty stomachs.Footnote ¹²⁸

In a centrally heated, abundant age in which we are insulated from many such discomforts, diaries remind us that the past is occupied by countless separate consciousnesses, swayed from one day to the next by their moods and instincts (in which, at least in wartime, sexual desire seems to rank lower than hunger and dislike of noise, wet, and cold). Twentieth-century British diaries seem especially revealing when their relationship to their historical moment somehow subverts our expectations about social attitudes or popular responses to public events. It is useful to note that, on 19 June 1940, Walter Musto was more saddened by the state of Chessington Zoo than the fall of Paris.Footnote ¹²⁹ Or that a Wolverhampton housewife who kept a diary in the first months of 1941, when news from the war was particularly bad, was far more deeply affected by the inquest into the death of Virginia Woolf.Footnote ¹³⁰ Or that Nella Last found VE day anti-climactic, in contrast with the “wild mafficking” of the South African War, and eventually celebrated it by opening a tin of pears.Footnote ¹³¹ Untroubled by the historian's reaching after pattern and significance, diarists often juxtapose the public and private, the momentous and banal, in unexpected ways.

It is striking that the most prominent exhibit in the Samuel Pepys room of the 2009–10 Wellcome Institute Exhibition Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives, alongside extracts from historical diaries, was a streaming video of the confessional chair of the “Diary Room,” in which housemates talked “privately” to Big Brother while also being broadcast to viewers. In an age when openly accessible blog posts and social networking sites host perpetual updates on the mundane details of people's lives, in ways that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago, the long-term commitment to private writing in the personal diary seems an impressive, even heroic act. It may be that some of the popular fascination with the private diaries of the recent past stems from this recent shift in public attitudes towards personal privacy that the sociologist Eva Illouz has called “the transformation of the public sphere into an arena for the exposition of private life.”Footnote ¹³² But it may also mean that there is a temptation to read this kind of diary through the lens of our own era's transformed attitudes to self-expression and emotional “authenticity”: the diary as a kind of secular confessional and giver-up of secrets. My sense, on the contrary, is that these diaries best illuminate their historical context when we recognize that the key thing about them is that, while they are mediated by cultural conventions and expectations, they are, finally, private. Their writings may brim over with intriguing historical detail, but diarists and their meanings will always be ultimately enigmatic and unknowable.