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.