Thraliana

[1] To encourage his wife's writing her husband Henry Thrale gave her six blank diary books, with the title Thraliana on the cover, in 1776.

[5] After searching for English models for writing her Ana, she settled on used John Selden's Table Talk, William Camden's Remains, and Joseph Spence's Anecdotes as her guides.

[7] Boswell, when trying to find information for his own work, wrote: "Mr. Thrale told me, I am not sure what day, that there is a Book of Johnsoniana kept in their Family, in which all Mr. Johnson's sayings and all that they can collect about him is put down ...

The Thraliana was eventually published in 1942, and it was produced by the Clarendon Press in England while its editor, Katharine Balderston, was prohibited from travelling across the ocean from Wellesley College because of World War II.

[10] Thrale explains that her book is not for "diary-keeping in the strict sense"[4] when she writes on the first page: "It is many Years since Doctor Samuel Johnson advised me to get a little Book, and write in it all the little Anecdotes which might come to my Knowledge, all the Observations I might make or hear; all the Verses never likely to be published, and in fine ev'ry thing which struck me at the Time.

Mr Thrale has now treated me with a Repository, - and provided it with the pompous Title of Thraliana; I must endeavour to fill it with Nonsense new and old.

This is especially true when she writes: "Life has been to me nothing but a perpetual Canvass carried on in all parts of the World - not to make Friends neither - for I have certainly found very few - but to keep off Enemies".

[14] Thrale's anecdotes were popular when they were first published in various works, but many readers initially thought that her "relaxed and natural style" was vulgar.

[15] However, Martine Brownley points out that this style helped win over 20th century readers even though the work suffered from "unevenness".