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Autobiographical and individual records of everyday life in the slave societies of the British Caribbean come to us almost exclusively from British hands.1 It was the Briton who travelled and perhaps spent a significant part of his or her life in the islands who had the time and technologies, and the interest and inclination, to produce such personal accounts. The Creole, island-born whites seem never to have had much enthusiasm for chronicles of this sort though some of them penned abundant letters full of news and business. Enslaved people lacked almost all of the things prerequisite to personal record-keeping.
Although the surviving personal journals are few, a handful of them have been influential in the development of the historiography of the British West Indies. Until quite recently, the personal journal most familiar to modern historians has been that of Maria Nugent, wife of a governor of Jamaica, whose record covered the years 1801 to 1805. Born in colonial America, Nugent thought of herself as thoroughly British and modern scholars have generally regarded her in this light. Thus Bridget Brereton, writing in 1995, included Nugent in a group of women writers, along with Janet Schaw, Elizabeth Fenwick, Mrs Carmichael and Frances Lanaghan, who brought to their texts "a strongly British, and aristocratic (or, at least, upper-middle-class) consciousness".2
Nugent's account gained its visibility through an initial printing in 1839 and its ready availability throughout the twentieth century in subsequent editions. Best known as Lady Nugent's Journal, the work was used by the first academic historians of the British West Indies, and the vitality and lively style of Nugent's descriptive account made it one of the most frequently cited sources for studies of colonial society during slavery. It quickly became a popular choice for anthologies of travel writing and of diarizing, and entered a bourgeois branch of popular culture.3 The journal's importance lies in its detailed impressions of creole life and manners in the years immediately preceding the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, in its contribution to a picturesque aesthetic, and in the simple rarity of personal accounts of Jamaica written by members of the governing class and by women.4
Nugent is identified in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "diarist" and it was...