This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

For all intents and purposes, life was good for Karen: happily married and settled with three children and a nice life. A series of events -- including bereavement; a large, organised fraud involving threats, police involvement and a court case; and the sudden severe ill health of her husband -- sent her down a deep hole. Major depression and anxiety opened boxes that were closed many years ago containing trauma that was never disclosed and everything collapsed. PTSD added to the deep despair and there were numerous episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts. Six years of repeated admissions (mostly involuntary) followed, being treated with medications and four courses of ECT. ECT was instrumental in Karen being well enough to be able to engage with the therapy she needed for long-term recovery. The story is narrated with original diary extracts and poems written at the time of her suffering. Karen now works with the ECT Accreditation scheme, reviewing ECT clinics around the country, and has spoken extensively about her experiences to journalists and at conferences, trying to reduce the stigma that surrounds the treatment. She is also employed in the clinic where she received treatment as a peer support worker

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter looks at the evidence of Pepys’s diary manuscript and at the implications of Pepys’s decision to write in shorthand. These are dimensions usually missing from discussion of this key source, for the nature of Pepys’s shorthand is generally not well understood by commentators. Pepys used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, known as ‘tachygraphy’. The chapter begins by explaining how this system worked and how it shaped Pepys’s prose style. With illustrations from Pepys’s manuscript, it uses his description of the Great Fire and Charles II’s coronation to show how his pages differ from what is in print. It then explores the escalating methods of disguise that he developed for sexual passages and the implications of this. Finally, it considers what his manuscript tells us about his intentions in writing, especially about his sense of who might read his diary.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

On his death in 1703, Pepys left his library to his old college, instructing that it be preserved ‘for the benefit of posterity’. Among this collection was his diary. This chapter demonstrates that Pepys’s choice to save his journal was part of wider plans to shape the historical record. It was a response to the hostile political climate of the 1690s and to the types of histories then being written. Pepys was an expert in creating and controlling archives – his own and others. He intended his diary to be read alongside his naval records and in conditions that would secure it a sympathetic reception. Pepys’s collecting also shows he had an expansive sense of what (and who) might be worthy of future historians’ attention. What he termed his ‘scheme’ for his library’s future was, ultimately, a design on future readers and we need to factor this in when interpreting his records.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.

This chapter tells the story of how the uncensored text of Pepys’s diary was finally published in the late twentieth century, before turning to the diary’s online presence in the twenty-first century. The complete text, edited by Latham and Matthews, appeared between 1970 and 1983. However, the decision to publish the diary in full was made much earlier, at the time of the controversial Lady Chatterley trial (1960). Getting all the diary into print required navigating the new law against obscene publications, with implications for how the diary is read today. International collaboration – and behind-the-scenes controversy – also shaped this edition. Collaboration is likewise a feature of the site pepysdiary.com (2003-present), which attracts an international community of readers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this site became a record of how readers worldwide used Pepys’s history to interpret a contemporary plague.

This chapter examines the motivation of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) soldiers as derived from their personal ephemera, in particular unpublished documents collected directly from the battlefield by US forces and their allies. These frontline accounts in the Vietnamese language uncover hidden memories and offer important clues to understanding the diversified enlistment, combat, and sustaining motivations of the Northern-born regulars. Such organic memories contribute an unvarnished immediacy that can clarify the North Vietnamese fighters perceptions and experiences during the war. Employing individual memory and associated narratives as both source and subject fits into a fairly small genre, representing a very new field without an operating paradigm to amplify understanding of and fill gaps in the PAVN histories. This chapter, in contrast to many Vietnam War studies, explores how the PAVN was not invincible and how it was also a conscript rather than a volunteer army of combatants who shared feelings similar to homesick draftees wearing the US and other uniforms.

This Introduction highlights the importance of this collection - the first of its kind - for showcasing the paradigm-shifting quality of the Anne Lister archive. It describes Lister’s growing importance to a range of disciplines that include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, life writing and travel writing. It outlines how Lister’s transgression of gender and sexual boundaries not only marked and shaped every aspect of her lived experience, but also has challenged our understanding of the evolution of sexual and gendered narratives up to the present. Decoding Anne Lister includes interviews and essays on Lister’s queer sexuality and gender variance, her role as a diarist, her pushing of gender barriers through her involvement in local politics and in the managing of her Shibden Hall estate, her adventurous and at times gender-defying travels through Britain, Europe and the Russian Caucasus, and on the highly successful adaptation of the Lister diaries into the BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack. Each chapter shows how the Lister diaries have helped to reconfigure the more traditional trajectories of nineteenth-century histories of gender and sexuality, and of social and political life.

This chapter examines the imaginative choices, and the implications of these choices, that John Manningham made as he created a record of his daily life, what we now call his Diary, relating these choices to the urban metaphysical style that I have traced in the previous chapters. Manninghams collection of notes as a whole does imply that he rejected a more pragmatic or moralistic approach to his recordkeeping, a rejection in line with Nashes turn away from humanist utility and towards contention and wit. In addition, once we view Manningham’s diary as a reordering of experience, we can identify within the selection and sequence of entries a particular orientation to the world, a processing of urban reality that aligns with the recreation of reality in the writings of his Inns peers. Not only might we see a rejection of humanist models of reading and writing in the diary, we can also clearly see Manningham embracing a skeptical, witty, and contentious style of being in the world. It is a style that is highly performative, just as Nashe’s prose and the Inns satires are; it is also a style that signals an awareness of the heterogeneity and fragmentary nature of urban experience.

Who wrote and circulated the first detailed account of the investigation? Depending entirely on this mysterious text, from the 1830s to the 1890s, Mexico’s most influential writers, thinkers, and political commentators retold the story of the deaths of Dongo and his servants, Emparan’s investigations, and the rapid resolution of the crime. These nineteenth-century retellings appeared in various kinds of publications, from periodicals to multi-volume novels. Each of these versions had its own interpretative angle, but all of the nineteenth-century authors contextualized the massacre as an important symbol of the legacy of the Spanish empire. The case also provided Mexican intellectuals with a starting point for discussions about morality and free will, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church, and, above all, the effective Novohispanic judiciary in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of law enforcement in their new nation. This text provided fuel for political critique and its insider legal perspective strengthened the points of anyone who deployed it to argue their own views about the independent nation of nineteenth-century Mexico.

The Dongo massacre, the backstories of the perpetrators, and the execution of Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco offer the most famous examples of how violence and entertainment intertwined in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Texts dating to this era chronicle the multitude of other spectacles which displayed the viceroys’ vindictive justice in the form of corporal punishment and executions. These spectacles sent out a strong message from the authorities regarding the values that they wished to promote. They expected the urban crowds to watch, hear, and smell the consequences of lawbreaking in New Spain.

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.