18th Century Diaries Written Like Twitter

This is interesting:

In reviewing volumes of diaries, mostly written by women, [a researcher] found many terse records about what was happening in daily life in the same style demanded by Twitter’s 140-character limit. Many diary entries ranged, for example, from what was for dinner to reports of deaths, births, marriages and travel, such as “April 7. Mr. Fiske Buried. April 27. Made Mead. At the assembly,” from the 1770 diary of Mary Vial Holyoke of Salem, Mass.

Diarists wrote under the constraints of small notebooks that allotted only a few lines per date entry, and some historians argue that diary writers — who lived busy, stressful lives in a time when leisure existed only for the rich — found such constraints freeing. Diaries of the era were intended to be semi-public documents to be shared with others, Humphreys said. The modern notion of confessional, reflective entries hadn’t come into play.

“Our whole notion of privacy is a relatively modern phenomenon,” she added. “You really don’t get a sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century, so it makes perfect sense that diaries or journals prior to that time were much more social in nature.”

I would argue that the cost of a diary and ink must have also played into those brief entries, at least for some. I’d love to know what a notebook the size of today’s Moleskines would have cost in relation to the average person’s income…

Read more at Researcher finds diary entries are akin to tweets | R&D Mag.

5 thoughts on “18th Century Diaries Written Like Twitter”

  1. Here’s an example of one of these small, terse diaries:

    http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2582482?n=164

    I became enamored of this sort of diary keeping after reading entries from the link above. So I bought a pocket-sized, five-year diary that I was going to try to use as a one-year diary. I kept at it for a few months, valiantly trying to keep my entries contained on one page. I couldn’t do it and eventually abandoned the effort and went back to my free-form, often lengthy journaling style.

    I still love these compact diaries and am tempted to give it another shot. Maybe I’ll keep a terse, daily diary for fun and also keep doing my regular journaling. Honestly, writing in notebooks is my absolutely favorite thing to do!

  2. I kept a diary like that myself when I was ten. It was a five years’ diary and I liked the idea of compressing the whole day into 3 lines. It could be like haiku, I thought, where you do more with less. My dad’s friend had a diary he kept for years that was one sentence per day.

    Right now I like these:
    http://hill7.wordpress.com/

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