Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall (review)

This Journal is my safety valve," seventeen-year-old Caroline Healey Dall wrote on November 12, 1839 (12). For decades to come, the diary remained her place to ponder, rant, speculate, admonish, adore, and contemplate her life and her writing skills. Beginning in 1838 and continuing until just a year before her death, Dall's writings are also a rich repository of cultural issues that emerged throughout the nineteenth century. (The edition spans the years 1838 to 1865.) As part of the commitment by the Massachusetts Historical Society to publishing U.S. women's diaries, this selection of Dall's seventy-five years of diary-keeping provides readers with an important opportunity to theorize the aesthetics of nineteenth-century diaries and to consider the correlations between diary-writing and women's political writing.

Helen R. Deese is meticulous in her textual editing. Brief, non-intrusive statements periodically detail important events in Dall's life, and the scholarly apparatus is sophisticated and yet readily accessible to the non-specialist as well. If there is an occasional overindulgence in notes, it is rare; most often the notes are short but informative. The introduction offers a brief biography and then focuses on an analysis of Dall's diary-writing. Since Deese is the premier scholar of Dall's life and works, I would have appreciated a more extensive introduction that presented a comprehensive biography as well, but to have diary entries of this length published at all is notable.

As a lifelong activist, Dall addresses women's education, suffrage, and labor in the pages of her diary; but equally important are the ways in which she captures the everyday life of a lecturer: the carriage that does not arrive, the housing that is unkempt and lacking in privacy, the problems of caring for clothing during long tours, and the discomforting meetings with officers of organizations that were funding her lectures. The diary complements her published writings, offering a multivalent map to the growth of her ideas as she traveled, became immersed in Transcendentalist circles, and socialized with the intellectuals of her age. Amusing comments on the need to keep Dr. Mary Caroline Hinckley, the radical activist and free love advocate, seated away from Bronson Alcott during an evening's gathering in his home are situated among more serious analyses of the despair that could often come with the activist's life (243–44). Away from friends and family and forced to maintain relationships through correspondence, Dall writes movingly of the challenges of rising above her personal insecurities to present a professional face to her audiences: "I felt utterly alone at the best, and found it difficult to feel even a proper care for the result. The reception of this night's lecture was almost an ovation. . . . I spoke an hour & a half. My unhappiness made me reckless—and so imparted a greater freedom to my delivery, which was perhaps an advantage. At all events, I had a splendid audience who . . . said I had never given so good a lecture" (267). So, too, does the diary capture the more conservative side of Dall's thinking, including her debates with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in which Dall opposed women's work with presidential politics in 1864. Dall's repeated assertions that the differences between the two women do not matter are belied by her inability to drop the subject: "It is too absurd to notice at all," she insists, but adds, "I supposed there was at least a shadow of reason & truth in [Stanton's criticism of Dall's ideas] . . . but there is none" (340, 341). As her text reveals, diaries often reveal the personal agendas that drove nineteenth-century women activists to face the public and demand change.

Daughter of Boston should be essential reading for scholars of nineteenth-century U.S. literatures. Dall's is at times a wickedly impatient...