Description

During the 1840s, Cassiobury House and its estate in Watford, Hertfordshire, the seat of Arthur Algernon Capel, sixth Earl of Essex, was home for three children. This very large and beautiful aristocratic mansion, which included four libraries and was filled with pictures, ornaments and historical curiosities, was also a home in which children explored and played.

The diary of the daughter of the family, thirteen-year-old Lady Adela Capel, provides a very personal glimpse into the life, education and interests of these children. It is a painstaking record of one year in Adela’s life, her interests, and the people with whom she spent her time in this unusually liberal Victorian aristocratic household.

Adela was writing at that stage in her life when she was beginning to question some of the practices of those around her. Although her diary is the writing of a child, the passionate outburst following the entry on 22 August 1841 concerns the cruelty to her father’s deer that she had just witnessed, and is reminiscent of the typical questionings and anger of a teenager. Her pets and the animals and birds that she saw every day in Cassiobury Park are her passion. She visits London where she is taken to the theatre and other attractions but Adela states quite vehemently that she prefers life in the countryside to living in London.

The word ‘teenager’ was first coined long after the diary was written, but it aptly describes that period between childhood and adulthood on which Adela had embarked. This is the diary of a very privileged Victorian teenager.

Paperback: 90 pages
Publisher: Hertfordshire Record Society Vol XXII, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-9547561-4-7
Dimensions: 23.5 x 15.5 x 0.6 cm