Diary was first used in 1581 by the judge William Fleetwood in a letter in which he includes the week’s diary. By the beginning of the 1600s it was obviously well known enough that the playwright Ben Jonson could include in his play Volpone the phrase “this is my diary, wherein I note my actions of the day”.
The personal description of what is happening really only started in the Renaissance period. In English the genre was really initiated by Samuel Pepys who recorded his life between 1660 and 1670, thus providing a first-hand record of the Great Plague and Great Fire (both of which ravaged London) life as a high-ranking civil servant and his private affairs including being caught in flagrante by his wife.
Now there is an industry of diary writers – describing, justifying, amusing. Bridget Jones and Adrian Mole tracked their fictional way from adolescence to mid-life crisis and a (no-longer) anonymous call girl described her non-fictional second working life. Hitler’s diary caused a storm of interest worldwide even after it was declared a fake. There are many who write only for self-expression, probably the most famous of which was Anne Frank.
Often the fine line between diary and autobiography is lost. But more on that in Monday’s blog.
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