Silence, Dissent, and Affective Relations in the Juvenile Diaries of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–1895)

Abstract

This article will explore the extraordinary juvenile archive of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen. It will consider how young people could be active participants in the shaping of family archives, leading to the curation of more dissonant histories. In Eva’s case this involved writing in tandem with, but also in counterpoint to, the journals of her father, Edward. The survival of contemporaneous diaries from daughter and father enables micro-comparisons of daily entries to interrogate the diverse and multilayered strategies of evasion, obliqueness, and self-censorship they deployed in the intricate and fluctuating construction of authorial selves. Edward’s journals reveal his intimate friendships with a number of young men and reference his wife’s distressed response. The article considers how far it is possible to trace the implications of hidden queer histories through the study of a juvenile archive. In so doing it delineates how, despite a loving relationship between father and daughter, Eva’s diaries quietly identified many facets of Edward’s patriarchal masculinity. She also deployed comic ‘entertainment narratives’ to record awkward family moments, but used silence to register dissent from other aspects of her father’s behaviour. Exploring juvenile life writing, it will be suggested, requires a new archival hermeneutics in which the meanings of archives and their construction can reveal hidden dynamics as well as pointing to the cultural agency of young diarists.