Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-lrblm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-05T01:23:53.751Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

25 - Diary and autobiography

from PART V - LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Stuart Sherman
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

In 1656 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a short piece she named ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life’. Near the end, she rather anxiously invoked some ancient autobiographical precedents: ‘I hope my Readers will not think me vain for writing my life, since there have been many that have done the like, as Caesar, Ovid, and many more, both men and women, and I know no reason I may not do it as well as they.’ There were, as she suggests, conspicuous antecedents for autobiography: mostly male, formidably famous, and widely scattered across space and time. But Cavendish's pronouncement works better as forecast than as retrospect. In England over the ensuing century and a half, ‘many more’ writers than ever before, ‘both men and women’, diverse in origin and status, working in both diary and autobiography, manuscript and print, found ample reason that they too, ‘as well as’ the more renowned practitioners of the past, could and should press their own lives onto the page. Some hundred years after Cavendish's assertion, such convictions received another imprimatur. ‘[T]here has rarely passed a life’, Samuel Johnson declared in one essay, ‘of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.’ In another, he concluded that the most useful such narrative is not biography but autobiography: ‘Those relations are commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story.’ The practice that Cavendish rather anxiously defended, Johnson confidently affirmed. In the years between, the stimuli towards self-inscription had become more varied, the models and precedents more promiscuous, the means and justifications more widely available.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 649 - 672
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Addison, Joseph, and Steele, Richard, The Spectator, ed. Bond, Donald, 5 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Baruth, Philip E. (ed.), Introducing Charlotte Charke, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Beadle, John, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian, London, 1656.Google Scholar
Boswell, James, Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763, Pottle, Frederick A., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950.Google Scholar
Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Chapman, R. W., Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1980.Google Scholar
Bruner, Jerome, ‘The Autobiographical Process’, in Folkenflik, Robert (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p..Google Scholar
Bruss, Elizabeth W., Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. Stachniewski, John with Pacheco, Anita, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Burney, Frances, Early Journals and Letters, Troide, Lars E. et al., 4 vols., Kingston, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988–2003.Google Scholar
Burney, Frances, The Journals and Letters, Hemlow, Joyce etal., 12 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–84.Google Scholar
Burney, Frances, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, eds. Hemlow, Joyce et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), vol. 1, p..Google Scholar
Cavendish, Margaret, ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life’, in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, eds. Bowerbank, Sylvia and Mendelson, Sara (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), p..Google Scholar
Cavendish, Margaret, ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life’, in Bowerbank, Sylvia and Mendelson, Sara (eds.), Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Charke, Charlotte, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke, ed. Rehder, Robert, London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999.Google Scholar
Cibber, ColleyAn Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber; With an Historical View of the Stage During His Own Time, ed. Fone, B. R. S., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001.Google Scholar
Coleman, Patrick, Lewis, Jayne and Kowalik, Jill (eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, ed. Richetti, John, London: Penguin, 2001.Google Scholar
Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life, ed. Carretta, Vincent, London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Folkenflik, Robert (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Gibbon, Edward, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Radice, Betty, London: Penguin, 1984.Google Scholar
Hume, David, ‘My Own Life’, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Flew, Antony, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1988.Google Scholar
John, Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, The Idler (1758–60) and The Adventurer (1753–54), ed. Bate, W. J., Bullitt, John M. and Powell, L. F., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 11, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, The Rambler (1750–52), ed. Bate, Walter J. and Strauss, Albrecht, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. 111—v, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Mascuch, Michael, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Felicity, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham, Robert and Matthews, William, 11 vols., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970–83.Google Scholar
Porter, Roy (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
Sherman, Stuart, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1795, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thrale, Hester Lynch, Thraliana, Balderston, Katherine C., 2nd edn, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Womersley, David, Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation, 1776–1815, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolf, Daniel, ‘News, History and the Construction of the Present in Early Modern England’, in Dooley, Brendan and Baron, Sabrina A. (eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×