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Abstract
The manuscript diary of Jane Attwater (1753–1844), an earnestly religious woman from a village near Salisbury in England, offers valuable insight into how women's so-called “private” writings were crucial in preserving familial and community history and in contributing to the production of religious culture. Written regularly between the ages of twelve and eighty-one, Attwater's diary is the most extensive diary written by a nonconformist woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The text itself is an extraordinary record of her own religious and family life. At the same time, the materiality of the diary reveals a complex interweaving of faith, family, and memory. The diary contains four generations of Attwater women's diary entries, carefully interleaved to produce diary-conversations; there is evidence of ongoing revisions and excisions throughout; and it was studiously and self-consciously curated for future readership. Attwater wrote both as an aid to her own memory, faithfully placing on paper reminders of God's help, and to preserve the memory of her family and religious community, creating what Pierre Nora calls “lieux de mémoire” – sites for anchoring a group's memory.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 On Richard Gay, see Kerry J. Birch, “Richard Gay of Haycombe: An Exploration of a Story and its Influence on Local Baptist Family and Community History,” Baptist Quarterly 37.8 (1998): 367–85.
2 On Anne Steele, see Cynthia Aalders, To Express the Ineffable: The Hymns and Spirituality of Anne Steele (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008).
3 Marjorie Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare: The Story of Two Village Families (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker, 1978) 44; Timothy Whelan, ed., NonConformist Women Writers, 1720–1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering, 2011–12) 4: 191–92. For more detailed introductions to Attwater, see Timothy Whelan, Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion, 1766–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2015) 126–53; Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers 4: 191–200; 8: 105–16; Marjorie Reeves, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Non-Conformist Culture, 1700–1900 (London: Leicester UP, 1997) 95–139. The diary itself is preserved in the Attwater Papers at the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford (hereinafter Attwater Papers); the Reeves Collection at the Bodleian Library (hereinafter Reeves Collection); and the Whitaker Collection at Trowbridge Museum (hereinafter Whitaker Collection).
4 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 30; William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1938) 38.
5 Marjorie Reeves, “Jane Attwater's Diaries” in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B.R. White, eds. William H. Brackney, Paul Fiddes, and John H.Y. Briggs (Macon: Mercer UP, 1999) 207. See further Effie Botonaki, “Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30.1 (1999): 3–21; Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 33–56; Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 236–54.
6 Isaac Watts, “Unfruitfulness, Ignorance, and Unsanctify’d Affections” in Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by J.H. for John Lawrence, 1709) 274. Jane Attwater diary, 14 August 1769. Attwater Papers. To ease reading, when quoting manuscript sources I have made small changes to spelling and punctuation to correspond to modern usage.
7 On a copy of the poem kept for herself, Attwater wrote: “Some lines I wrote to cousin Philip to be inserted in his book designed for texts and particular events, January 1786.” Attwater Papers. See also Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare 44.
8 Jane Attwater diary, 17 May 1781. Attwater Papers.
9 Jane Attwater diary, note dated 13 July 1805. Attwater Papers.
10 Jane Attwater diary, 27 October 1799. Attwater Papers.
11 Jane Attwater diary, 2 February 1804. Attwater Papers.
12 Ibid.
13 Jane Attwater diary, note dated 13 July 1805. Attwater Papers.
14 Jane Attwater diary, n.d. Attwater Papers.
15 Margaret Ezell considers such fragments, as well as manuscript references to life writings that have not survived, to be significant “fossil” remains. Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women's Life Writing” in Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England, eds. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) 45.
16 Jane Attwater diary, n.d. Attwater Papers.
17 Anna Blatch diary, preserved in Jane Attwater diary, July 1804. Attwater Papers.
18 Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999) 154–61.
19 Reeves, “Jane Attwater's Diaries,” 208.
20 Anna Blatch diary, n.d. Attwater Papers.
21 Jane Attwater diary, 1804. Attwater Papers.
22 Jane Attwater diary, 1807. Attwater Papers.
23 Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992) 60. See further Dan Doll and Jessica Munns, eds., Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2006) 20; Ezell, “Domestic Papers.”
24 Jane Attwater diary, 1780–82. Attwater Papers. On codes in diaries, see Ezell, “Domestic Papers,” 40–41; Sara Heller Mendelson, “Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs” in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985) 183.
25 William Gladstone, for example, kept a daily diary, but when his young daughter Jessy was gravely ill he began to keep a separate detailed account of her last days, which he marked “most private.” Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 168–69. See also Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).
26 Jane Attwater diary, note pinned at 28 July 1809. Attwater Papers.
27 Jane Attwater diary, n.d. Whitaker Collection.
28 Jane Attwater diary, 6 August 1809. Whitaker Collection.
29 Anna Attwater diary, n.d., and Jane Attwater diary, 28 July 1809. Attwater Papers. For a methodology for reading inclusions in manuscript diaries, see Cynthia Huff, “Reading as Re-Vision: Approaches to Reading Manuscript Diaries,” Biography 23.3 (2000): 504–23.
30 Anna Attwater diary, n.d., found in Jane Attwater diary for 1809. Attwater Papers.
31 Jane Attwater diary, 28 July 1809. Attwater Papers.
32 Jane Attwater diary. Attwater Papers. Cf. 1 Corinthians 13.12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
33 Anna Attwater diary, 17 May 1740. Found in Jane Attwater's diary. Attwater Papers. Cf. Romans 8.37: “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
34 Jane Attwater diary, 2 October [unknown year]. Attwater Papers.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Whitaker Collection.
39 Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers 4: 208. Anna was named after her hymn-writing aunt Anne Steele, who published under the penname Theodosia. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12.1: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh.”
40 Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers 4: 208.
41 Ibid. 4: 209.
42 Reeves Collection. The identity of this niece is uncertain.
43 Jane Attwater diary, 26 March 1786. Attwater Papers.
44 Quoted in Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers 4: 199 n. 4.
45 Cf. 1 Samuel 7.12: “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.”
46 Jane Attwater diary, 20 January 1833. Attwater Papers.
47 Jane Attwater diary. Attwater Papers.
48 Jane Attwater diary, note dated 13 July 1805. Attwater Papers.
49 Cynthia Aalders, “Writing Religious Communities: The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Culture of English Women, c.1740–90,” D.Phil. diss., U of Oxford, 2014, 261–63.
50 Susan M. Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004). Tanya Fitzgerald also explores the connection between archives and family homes in her efforts to explore women's missionary activity in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Tanya Fitzgerald, “Archives of Memory and Memories of Archive: CMS Women's Letters and Diaries, 1823–35,” History of Education 34.6 (2005): 657–74.
51 Sandra Stanley Holton, Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930 (London: Routledge, 2007) 24–28. See also Sandra Stanley Holton, “Family Memory, Religion and Radicalism: The Priestman, Clark and Bright Kinship Circle of Women Friends and Quaker History,” Quaker Studies 9.2 (2005): 156–75; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003); David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998); Margaret Benefiel, “‘Weaving the Web of Community’: Letters and Epistles” in Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women's Writings, 1650–1700, eds. Mary Garman et al. (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1996) 443–52.
52 Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar, eds., Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents (North York: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001).
53 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” in Memory and Counter-Memory, spec. issue of Representations 26 (1989) 9, 7.
54 Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker, eds., Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).