By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the fourth part of a series. Read Part I, Part II, and Part III to catch up.

“Here I am in London, as big as life.”

These are the words 13-year-old Henrietta Schroeder wrote in her diary on August 15, 1889. She was on a European tour with her widowed mother and three siblings. The family had been traveling up and down the U.K. and would now spend three weeks in and around London before moving on to the continent.

Late Victorian London was a booming, bustling metropolis. The population of inner London alone was already over four million, quadruple what it had been at the start of the century. In 1889, it was the most populous city in the world, and Henrietta was very excited to be there.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Schroeders were indefatigable tourists, and in her diary Henrietta described the sights they saw and shared her unfiltered opinions. She thought Westminster Abbey was “lovely” and especially liked Poets’ Corner and the tomb of Queen Elizabeth. While there, unable to help herself, she had “leaned over, and touched the tomb of an old Saxon king, dated 616!!!” This was presumably King Saeberht of Essex.

The family also visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, took a trip up and down the Thames to see the West and East India Docks, oohed and aahed over the Queen’s golden jubilee presents on display at Windsor Castle, and of course spent some time at the massive Crystal Palace. Henrietta pasted several prints of the building into her diary.

One attraction that didn’t overly impress Henrietta was Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, but that was probably because her mother didn’t allow her into the Chamber of Horrors. The Chamber of Horrors was home to what promotional material at the time called “the most extraordinary relic in the world,” the blade of a guillotine from the French Revolution.

Like many teenagers then and now (and a lot of adults, let’s be honest), Henrietta was fascinated by the more macabre parts of history. Her diary is full of references to historical figures who’d been imprisoned or stabbed or beheaded or tortured. She’d been delightfully spooked by the dungeons at Carlisle Castle. Now, after touring the Tower of London, she breathlessly recounted how she

“walked over the site of the scaffold where lady Jane Gray, Anne Boleyn and others were beheaded. And by the way, I saw the scaffold itself, STAINED WITH BLOOD!!”

Later she wrote about Canterbury Cathedral.

“You know that Thomas â Becket was murdered there? well, there is a little place marked where Tommie stood when he was murdered, and I stood on it too.”

In late August, the Schroeder family visited with some distant relatives in the wonderfully named village of Stoke Poges. Henrietta had mentioned the Gilliats before, but it wasn’t until this diary entry that I had enough information to identify them. The Schroeders were apparently guests at Duffield House, the home of Algernon Gilliat. He had three twenty-something sons, the youngest of whom later became both a footballer and an Anglican minister. If my research is correct, Algernon’s aunt married Henrietta’s uncle’s half-brother.

The U.K. portion of Henrietta’s diary ends, I think poignantly, with a single wild poppy she pressed into the volume on September 9, 1889. She explained, “When I pressed it, it turned purple, but it was scarlet once upon a time. The fields are red with them.”

Stay tuned for more about Henrietta in my next post.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the third part of a series. Read Part I and Part II to catch up.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the diaries of 13-year-old Henrietta Schroeder as much as I have. In early July 1889, she and her family were staying at Keswick, in England’s beautiful Lake District, part of their grand tour of Europe. After Keswick, they spent the summer traveling up and down Great Britain, hitting all the tourist hotspots.

As I mentioned in Part II, Henrietta described events a little out of order, frequently backtracking to catch up, so it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint her location. I’ve done my best to trace her route from July to the middle of August on this map.

The cities and towns the Schroeders visited included Carlisle, Glasgow, Rothesay, Rowardennan, Stirling, Edinburgh, Melrose, Newcastle upon Tyne, York, Rowsley, Warwick, Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and finally London. It’s no wonder she often fell behind in her diary!

I enjoy how Henrietta addressed her diary as if it were another person, calling it “my dear old Journal,” “my darling Journal,” “dearest Companion,” or “my dearest Confidante,” and apologizing when she neglected it. It feels like you, the reader, are having a conversation with her. But she also had another audience in mind: her best friend Caroline “Lina” Wetherill, who she mentioned frequently and missed terribly.

In fact, on July 6, when she received three letters from Lina, she was overjoyed, writing:

You see how she forgot herself entirely, and only thought of me and my well fare, she is the best girl that ever breathed the breath of life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh! dear! I wish that I were worthy of her!! . . . God bless her she is so sweet. The dear old girl! I wonder what she is doing now, I dare say she is climbing some haystack or perhaps swimming about like a duck in the water. I wonder if she ever thinks of me. Oh! I love her so!!!!!

The Schroeders were energetic tourists. Here are some of the sights they saw during this period: the Castlerigg stone circle, Carlisle Cathedral, Carlisle Castle, Rothesay Castle, Dunoon Castle, Loch Eck, Loch Katrine, Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, Melrose Abbey, Abbotsford, Newcastle Cathedral, Durham Castle, Durham Cathedral, York Minster, Haddon Hall, Chatsworth House, Kenilworth Castle, Warwick Castle, St. Mary’s Church in Warwick, Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare’s house, and Christ Church and Magdalen Chapel in Oxford.

What I like most about Henrietta is her combination of exuberance and irreverence. From making up songs to chipping off pieces of castles as keepsakes to complaining about her bedtime, she feels real. Her diary is also just plain funny. One entry mentions “that nasty old Cromwell,” like he was a schoolyard bully. And this dismissive aside made me laugh: “My window looks right down on the city, the Cathedral & a ruin of some abbey or something.”

But Henrietta was also growing up. I think we get a glimpse of this in the following passage, about a distant family relation the Schroeders happened to meet in Glasgow.

He has three awfully nice looking boys (they are young men though) and I am going to make a mark on one I know, for he stares at me so already. (Don’t say a word, we must make great friends with them, they are as rich as Croesus.[)]

I’ll pick up the next installment of Henrietta’s story in London.

by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the second part of a series. Read Part I here.

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to a precocious 13-year-old girl named Henrietta Schroeder. Her diaries in the Stout family papers are a really fun read.

When we last saw Henrietta, it was June 1889, and she was on her way to Europe on the S.S. Alaska with her mother, sister Lucy, and two brothers Langdon and Harry. Her father Francis Schroeder had died three years before.

Henrietta had a rough voyage; she got both sunburned and seasick (though “not actively so”!) Worse still was how much she missed her “most beloved and most loving friend” Caroline Bowen Wetherill, or “Lina.” Caroline was nine months younger than Henrietta and lived in Philadelphia. My best guess is that the two girls met in Jamestown, R.I., a popular vacation destination at the time. Henrietta’s diary includes a photograph of Jamestown and references to seeing Caroline there.

Henrietta wrote often in her diary about her “darling” Caroline. She described their last goodbye (“the last figure I saw kissing her hand to me through the window of the closed carriage”) and attached on facing pages both some flowers Caroline had sent and a folded-up “wish” to be opened when they saw each other again. The friends even had pet names for each other: “Lul-i-nun” for Caroline and “Yud-e-tub” for Henrietta. Try as I might, I couldn’t identify the source of the names.

After landing at Liverpool, the Schroeder family visited Chester, England, before traveling north to the Lake District. Henrietta seemed to enjoy sightseeing, and though she got some details wrong, her breathless descriptions would make an entertaining guidebook. She was especially awestruck by how old everything was.

While touring Chester Cathedral, which was undergoing renovation, Henrietta took—with the permission of the guide—a centuries-old piece of crumbling wall as a memento. The Schroeders also visited Chester’s ancient Roman baths, and Henrietta exclaimed, “just think, before Christ!” Later at their Lake District hotel, she slept in a large canopy bed that, she wrote excitedly, dated back to the reign of Elizabeth I. In a quieter moment, she summed it up this way: “No matter where you go, you step on graves.”

It’s around this time we get a glimpse of another side of Henrietta: her temper. One day when Lucy and Langdon went rowing with their mother, Henrietta stayed back with her younger brother Harry. Unfortunately the rowing party didn’t come back when they said they would.

“I was simply frightened out of my wits […] Twelve came, and still not a sign of them, and then half past twelve, and then I thought surely they were drowned or something, and I began planning out what to sell, to get a little money and pay for the bills of the hotel, and to telegraph to Grandpa for some money, and then one o’clock came, and with it in sailed Lucy as large as life […] I tell you, I gave it to her!!!!!!”

The stream-of-consciousness style of Henrietta’s diaries sometimes makes it hard to pinpoint exact dates and places, but July 4, 1889, found her at Lake Hotel in Keswick. She was enjoying the trip, but felt disappointed at having to spend Independence Day in the U.K., writing, “It will seem so horrid not to have any racket, you know it is a black day over here in England. Oh! how mean!” She celebrated by rising early, going into the woods, and belting out patriotic songs to no one in particular.

I hope you’ll join me next time for more of Henrietta’s adventures.