Details

Title

The Real Diary of a Real Boy

Author

Shute, Henry A.

Publication Date

1902

Publisher

The Reilly & Lee Co.

Place of Publication

Chicago

Collection

L.M. Montgomery Institute.

Note

Henry Shutes ‘Real Diary of a Real’ Boy (1902) was not the first comic diary Montgomery read. In youth, she had read Metta Victor’s “Bad Boy’s Diary”(1880), which actually inspired her to begin journaling herself. Montgomery clearly knew that Victor’s text was meant as humorous fiction, but here, with Shute’s ‘Real Diary,’ Montgomery may not have been so clear on the work’s actual genre. She told her journal, “Lately I have been having a fairly nice and peaceful time. Today I spent a merry hour reading a bit of a book–'The Real Diary of a Real Boy.' It certainly was very real although in one or two places it was impossible to avoid the suspicion that some parts have been doctored up by a more mature hand. What amused me most was his faithful record of each day’s weather–so like my own first ‘diry.’ ‘Today was cold with wind north-east’--’Very mild and showery’--and so on” (‘The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery, The PEI Years,’ Volume II, p. 84). While Shute’s ‘Real Diary’ was most certainly based on his own childhood experiences, it was not written by him when he was a ‘Boy’, but was instead a collection of memories and anecdotes shaped into a diary. Shute (1856–1943) was sometimes known as the “Mark Twain of New England,” and he made his writing career sharing funny stories based on or inspired by his days as a child in New Hampshire and a young man at Philips Exeter Academy and then Harvard. He became a practicing lawyer, but he also published nearly 100 short stories in popular magazines like the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ and ‘New England Magazine’. Montgomery’s understanding of the ‘Real Diary’ is likely complicated by Shute’s introduction, scanned here, where he claims to have found this diary in a closet. More regular readers of Shute’s work might have recognized the tongue-in-cheek nature of this anecdote and known that Shute was crafting a story from the very beginning. You can read the full text of the book here.

Genre

book

Type of Item

contemporaneous