Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman: Caroline Healey Dall

Personal diaries can be vital keys to history, and Caroline Healey Dall's writings will become a keystone to our understanding of 19th-century New England. Dall, the daughter of an upper-class merchant family, kept a diary of 45 volumes—filled with personal anecdote, social observations and astute analysis—from the age of 16 in 1838, to her death in 1912. Dall's involvement with a broad range of social change movements, including Transcendentalism, abolition and women's suffrage, placed her at the center of the most important public debates over America's political, religious, intellectual and social future. This volume, edited by Deese, the Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society, concentrates on the years 1838–1865. While Dall's political and literary observations are vital to an understanding of her time (she is intrigued by Whitman's Leaves of Grass but notes that the sexual content had "the slime of the serpent" on it), the best parts of the book are her comments on individuals, such as snide remarks about Elizabeth Peabody, the noted publisher and education reformer. Equally good are the deftly written details of Dall's personal life, which include her husband's desertion and her pain at receiving a "cool note" from a woman who had been a friend. The Dall diaries, even in this excerpted form, are a true historical find. B&w photos. (Oct.)