Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.