The Diaries of Charles Greville: The Greatest English Diarist After Samuel Pepys

Charles Greville made his first occasional diary entries in 1814, but the diary only became a regular habit in the mid-1820s, through the reigns of George IV, William IV, and Victoria. Finally, after shaking his head over the victories of Garibaldi, he closed it, once and for all, in 1860. The grandson of a duke, Greville looked with a level and scornful eye upon royalty. As Clerk of the Privy Council, Greville works for a compromise on the Reform Bill. He witnesses Covent Garden theatre burning down, and when cholera comes, he writes laconically of Mrs. Smith, young and beautiful, taken ill while dressing for Church and dead by nightfall. This is the intelligent voice of another age, an uneasy aristocrat catching history on the turn and looking dubiously at the future.