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This site is a work in progress. We hope to be up and running by, in all realism, September 2013.

Thursday, 27 June 2013

About Diary Entries

Motives for Diary –Keeping
The question of why diaries are written is not just one of idle interest. For the historian to assess the value and accuracy of a diary, or indeed of any source, he must consider why the document came into existence. The main motives for diary-keeping would appear to be: record-keeping and as an aide-mémoire; the psychological need to justify one’s own actions and vent frustrations; an almost disinterested desire to preserve contemporary observations for the historical record; self-aggrandizement and desire to make money, probably trough securing publication. These motives are not discrete: commonly at least two or more are operative. 

Value
This thought brings us to the third aspect of diary-keeping: their value to the historian. Every historical source, from newspaper cuttings to records of Cabinet meetings, can yield important material for the historian, but diaries can be more valuable than any. Why? Part of the reason lies in the length of time over which diaries are written: one can have a consistent thread running over perhaps 30 or 40 years of history, and the individual foibles of the diarist can be known and taken into account by the historian.

Dangers
But diaries can also, like any other source, mislead and distort. How much credence should one give them? It is often difficult to evaluate. Diaries can exaggerate the importance of the writer’s own standing and influence (conveying a misleading impression of their author’s centrality to the events described.) Diaries written up daily and which describe very recent developments can suffer from an excess of passion. Alan Brooke (the senior military chief for most of Second Word War) frequently exploded in his diary about the impossible Winston Churchill. This can give the historian an overly jaundiced view of their relationship.

Diaries, it should be remembered, are just one person’s record, often jotted down in haste, of feelings at a particular point in time. 

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