Arthur Sidgwick’s Diaries: Notes from a Work in Progress

by Emily Rutherford

This image (click for full size) is a page from the diary of a man called Arthur Sidgwick, who lived from 1840 to 1920 and who taught ancient Greek first at an elite private secondary school and then at Oxford. When he was an undergraduate, Sidgwick began to keep a written record of different aspects of his daily life. It ranges back in time to record the births of people like his wife and his closest university friends, and stays up-to-date with work appointments, travel plans, and more intimate details. Sidgwick filled this diary in retrospectively, possibly by copying information from an appointment book that doesn’t survive. But it’s very unlike the texts most historians and literary critics mean when they discuss the “Victorian diary”: it’s not written in complete sentences; what forms of introspection and emotional revelation there are here need to be read quite literally between the lines of the tabular format, which bears a greater resemblance to an accounting ledger than to a piece of life-writing. There’s a literature on accounting ledgers, particularly in the eighteenth century, but is it the right source for appropriate models for how to read this later, more qualitative, record? Perhaps not any more than the literature on Victorian diaries, which tends to characterize them as nakedly confessional documents, is.
As you might guess from this page, a lot of code-cracking has gone into my efforts to read this diary. Reading its five volumes was a slow process of figuring out the logic behind the ordering of the page: the list of travel destinations and days spent at each at the top, the column at right filled with initials that probably signifies correspondence with specific individuals, the column further to the right that, due to glosses of symbols such as “β” (bicycling) and “lt” (lawn tennis) that Sidgwick offers elsewhere, probably keeps track of his physical fitness. Some of the text is in Greek, a language of which I have limited knowledge—though likely more than the other women, such as Sidgwick’s wife and sister, who would have had access to this document as Sidgwick composed it. This is important, because translating the Greek (another act of decoding) sometimes reveals more intense emotions than Sidgwick is willing to express in English, and sometimes—veiled in metaphor or euphemism, requiring further decoding—references to sex. On this page Sidgwick marries his wife, Charlotte (just above the horizontal line that firmly divides his single from his partnered existence), and just below the line a Greek phrase offers one of a small handful of descriptive records of a wedding night in all of nineteenth-century English sources: “lovingly with her lips she made holy my shame.” Greek also offers the key to the code in the column between the date and the longer entry. On an earlier page, Sidgwick glosses the “|” symbol with a Greek word meaning “kisses,” and an “—” with two Greek euphemisms for sexual intercourse. The “μ,” on the other hand, appears roughly every 5 – 7 days out of every 25 – 30, and not in the months preceding the births of the Sidgwicks’ children. I’m sure you can work that one out for yourselves—but I have to confess I actually said “eureka” out loud in the archive when it dawned on me.
There are more codes I don’t have space to discuss here, not all of which I’ve cracked yet. I also don’t want to tell you too much about the conclusions I’ve drawn from my attempts to synthesize this enormous document, because they’re very much a work in progress. But the challenges this source raises have lessons for dealing with Victorian ego-documents more generally. I’ve shown you one page out of thousands, featuring a particularly significant event in the lives of Arthur and Charlotte Sidgwick. This page and others surrounding it are also important in historiographical terms, because they challenge the contentions of some work on Victorian marriage that the wedding night is typically shrouded in mystery in the archive, and that in the absence of records we have to assume that the sudden intrusion of carnal knowledge into couples’ previously homosocial lives was traumatic for both parties, particularly the wife. This document shows, however, that Charlotte enthusiastically expressed sensual desire, as well as some knowledge of what would happen to her physically on her wedding night (on this page and others, Sidgwick copies in excerpts from Charlotte’s letters to him). And that one wedding-night sentence in Greek, read between the lines, says a lot about carnal knowledge as well.
Still. It’s one page out of thousands. As revelatory as this finding is, it wouldn’t be appropriate to blow it out of proportion. It’s easy to get enchanted by clues and codes and to use them, in Freudian or Foucauldian style, to seek out the sexuality simmering just below the Victorian surface. Seen as a whole, though, these diaries’ story isn’t (only) about sex, whether marital or—as some have insisted—homoerotic. Read faithfully as Sidgwick’s own comprehensive tabulation of the varied aspects of his professional and personal lives, it shows how one man negotiated a multiplicity of affective bonds: with his wife, children, his students, his colleagues, his extended family, his lifelong friends. Sidgwick’s diaries help us to map more comprehensively than historians have before the variety of affective relations people had in this period—when emotions and sex worked differently to how they did today, and defy historians’ efforts to put them into boxes as easily as Sidgwick did his correspondence and his exercise routines.