ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the potentialities and operations of the diary as a mode of life writing, and to consider the nature of its exchanges with other forms of writing of the self. It seeks, in Regenia Gagnier's formulation, to look at diaries as 'rhetorical projects embedded in concrete material situations', as text, artefact and practice. What is the relationship between diary and autobiography? The traditional answer has been that the diary is subautobiographical, raw material for, perhaps aspiring to, but always falling short of, the complexity and richness of autobiography. Bamford's case challenges conventional understandings of the nineteenth-century diary and its relationships with autobiography. Multiple perspectives were also produced by the practice that was so central to Bamford's diary of inserting correspondence, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera. Beatrice Webb's diary epitomises the impotence of the daily form to constrain the perspective of the individual entry.
