By Michael Roberts Personal diaries are generally welcomed as a godsend by historians but their publication can raise complicated questions for editors and publishers. Most Victorianists, given a few seconds’ reflection, will be able to find illustrations to fit: the publisher John Murray, for example, burning Byron’s Journals before witnesses rather than risk scandal; Gladstone’s sons entrusting the great man’s diaries to the Archbishop of Canterbury until enough time might pass to dissipate scandal. One famous nineteenth-century diary to go
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