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Volume 2 | Issue 2 - Revolutions
Article by Katie Whitford. Edited by Victoria Ryves. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard
I recently watched Queen Victoria’s Men, a Channel Four documentary about Queen Victoria’s love life, which claimed at the start to be based on the Queen’s diaries. The extravagant statements made about Victoria on the authority of her diaries made me think about how useful diaries can be to historians. The use and reliability of different sources is a basic part of the study of history and has been a recurring theme in my course at university. I think sources as personal as diaries are especially interesting though, because they require so much extra consideration of different issues involved.
As with a lot of sources the historical use of diaries raises many questions: Why were they written? Who did the author expect to read them? These questions can often only be answered at best with an informed guess, but are very important in understanding the content of the diary and assessing its reliability. Another question you might need to ask is have the diaries been edited or censored? Anne Frank’s diary was not published in its full unabridged version until the 1990s.
Also, although it is very uncommon that a forged diary is ever thought to be authentic, it is perhaps worth considering who actually wrote the diary. You might have heard about the Hitler Diaries, which were authenticated by historian Lord Dacre and published in a German magazine in 1983. The magazine apparently paid $5 million dollars for them just a few days before Lord Dacre changed his mind about their authenticity. Similarly, “Jack the Ripper’s” diaries have been published and “Mussolini’s” were floating around for a while in the late 1950s (a recent Daily Mail article suggests that they are threatening to make a reappearance).
If you’ve managed to answer the first three questions and decided that the diary is really real, then there’s the “world view” conundrum to consider. As a completely different person coming from a completely different context, how much of the diary can we really understand as it is meant to be understood? With Victoria’s diaries, I wonder whether one person’s flirty conversation is another’s casual talk about the weather. The interpretation of the diary will change over time as morals, values and popular culture change. Today, we might place more emphasis on sex and relationships than Victoria intended. Personal diaries do not have to be explicit. Often they are written in a “note-to-self” format, where code words and familiar names, events and places do not have to be explained. This compounds the problem of world view and means that interpretations of a diary can be wildly different depending on who is reading it.
I have been wondering whether diaries written by famous people, or famous diaries themselves, pose different problems to the historian than ‘unknown’ diaries. Some diaries are so well known that their fame gives them a certain authority. There is an interesting article on Samuel Pepys written by Mark Dawson, who described Pepys’ diary as ‘implicitly viewed as a flawless artifact beyond the need of sustained criticism’. Dawson argues that it has been used almost like an encyclopedia of seventeenth century London. It doesn’t follow that a less well known diary would necessarily be used with more caution and analysed more thoroughly, but I think there is a danger that diaries like Pepys’, or Churchill’s, and perhaps Queen Victoria’s, are thought to be more useful and reliable simply because they are famous.
Dawson suggests that there is another issue with famous diaries and Pepys’ in particular (though I don’t think that this would apply as much to diaries written by famous people). Through the mass of secondary literature based on Pepys, the notoriety of Pepys ‘the man’ has become almost separate to his diary. It is tempting to use what is known and what has already been written about the man to judge or assess or contextualize the content of the diary. However, almost everything written about Pepys has been gathered from his diary. To contextualise the diary using what is known about the man who wrote it is to put the diary in the context of information which came from itself. This is surely flawed, but it is almost unavoidable for anyone who has heard about Pepys and has already formed opinions of him. These opinions are bound to affect the interpretation of the diary.
Because diaries are so personal, there can be a feeling that reading the diary is the same as getting to know the person who wrote it, which isn’t true. For figures like Queen Victoria of course, it is useful to put her diary in the context of what can already be known from the numerous other primary and secondary sources about her life. Queen Victoria’s Men was able to also draw upon the Queen’s personal letters and the diaries of those closest to her (although only Victoria’s diaries were really quoted in the documentary). What is missing in the case of Pepys’ is an abundance of information on him coming from outside the diary. This doesn’t mean that one diary is more useful than another, but the context in which you are able to put a diary will dictate how it can be usefully used.
Are diaries any more or less useful than any other type of source? Of course not. Everything depends on how a particular source is being used. To make some generalisations though, there are a few bonuses to the historical use of diaries. Compared to oral testimonies or memoirs, diaries tend to be written very soon after or during an event, so are not distorted by time or retelling. Despite the drawbacks of interpretation and bias, diaries still offer a potentially very honest and personal insight into the day to day lives of individuals and first hand accounts of events. Diaries are immediately intimate, familiar and interesting. It is telling that Queen Victoria’s Men proudly announced at the start the sources it was based on: who doesn’t love to read somebody else’s diary? Diaries can benefit the study of almost any area of history, because the only criteria in writing a diary is a level of literacy and some free time. They have equally been written by men and women, old and young people, pioneer farmers in nineteenth century America and seventeenth century English politicians.
Queen Victoria’s Men has used diaries to challenge the stereotype of the Queen as being serious, strict and repressed. Her diaries show a more human side of her than has been portrayed by other sources, which is fascinating. However, it is perhaps easy to put a twenty-first century spin on Victoria’s diaries and focus on this sexual aspect of her life at the expense of everything else. Discussion of politics, and the wider implications of Victoria’s fling with the Prime Minister, were notably missing in the documentary. As with any source, diaries are only useful when used alongside other sources, and allowed to speak for themselves as much as possible rather than being twisted by a modern perspective.
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Excerpts from Victoria’s diary: “Today is my eighteenth birthday! How old! and yet how far am I from being what I should be. I shall from this day take the firm resolution to study with renewed assiduity, to keep my attention always well fixed on whatever I am about, and to strive to become every day less trifling and more fit for what, if Heaven wills it, I’m some day to be. The courtyard and the streets were crammed when we went to the Ball, and the anxiety of the people to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it.” May 1837
“Never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright gazing as it were on unseen objects and not taking notice of me. I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter agonizing cry: ‘Oh! my dear darling!’, and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair unable to utter a word or shed a tear.” December 1861, the death of husband Prince Albert.
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