IN
the year 1770, a bright little girl
ten years of age, Anna Green Winslow, was sent from her far away home
in Nova Scotia to Boston, the birthplace of her parents, to be
"finished" at Boston schools by Boston teachers. She wrote, with
evident eagerness and loving care, for the edification of her parents
and her own practice in penmanship, this interesting and quaint diary,
which forms a most sprightly record, not only of the life of a young
girl at that time, but of the prim and narrow round of daily
occurrences in provincial Boston. It thus assumes a positive value as
an historical picture of the domestic life of that day;
a value of which the little girl who wrote it, or her kinsfolk
who affectionately preserved it to our own day, never could have
dreamed. To many New England families it is specially interesting as a
complete rendering, a perfect presentment, of the childish
life of their great grandmothers, her companions.
It is an even chance which ruling
thought in the
clever little writer, a love of religion or a love of dress,
shows most plainly its influence on this diary. On the whole,
I think that youthful vanity, albeit of a very natural and
innocent sort, is more pervasive of the pages. And it is fortunate that
this is the case; for, from the frankly frivolous though far from
self-conscious entries we gain a very exact notion, a very
valuable picture, of the dress of a young girl at that day.
We know all the details of her toilet,
from the "pompedore" shoes and the shifts (which she had never worn
till she lived in Boston), to the absurd and top-heavy head-decoration
of "black feathers, my past comb & all my past garnet
marquasett and jet pins, together with my silver plume." If this
fantastic assemblage of ornament were set upon the "Heddus roll," so
graphically described, it is easy to understand the denunciations of
the time upon women's headgear. In no contemporary record or account,
no matter who the writer, can be found such a vivacious and witty
description of the modish hairdressing of that day as in the pages of
this diary.
