Diary of Anna Green Winslow, a Boston School Girl of 1771

Spelling, punctuation and capitalization are as in the original. This includes the writer's various spellings of her own name.
The portrait of Anna Green Winslow, originally printed as the Frontispiece, has been moved down a few pages to avoid visual collision with the book cover.

ANNA GREEN WINSLOW

IN the year 1770, a bright little girl ten years of age, Anna Green Winslow, was sent from her far away home in Nova Scotia to Boston, the birthplace of her parents, to be finished at Boston schools by Boston teachers. She wrote, with evident eagerness and loving care, for the edification of her parents and her own practice in penmanship, this interesting and quaint diary, which forms a most sprightly record, not only of the life of a young girl at that time, but of the prim and narrow round of daily occurrences in provincial Boston. It thus assumes a positive value as an historical picture of the domestic life of that day; a value of which the little girl who wrote it, or her kinsfolk who affectionately preserved it to our own day, never could have dreamed. To many New England families it is specially interesting as a complete rendering, a perfect presentment, of the childish life of their great grandmothers, her companions.
It is an even chance which ruling thought in the clever little writer, a love of religion or a love of dress, shows most plainly its influence on this diary. On the whole, I think that youthful vanity, albeit of a very natural and innocent sort, is more pervasive of the pages. And it is fortunate that this is the case; for, from the frankly frivolous though far from self-conscious entries we gain a very exact notion, a very valuable picture, of the dress of a young girl at that day. We know all the details of her toilet, from the pompedore shoes and the shifts (which she had never worn till she lived in Boston), to the absurd and top-heavy head-decoration of black feathers, my past comb & all my past garnet marquasett and jet pins, together with my silver plume. If this fantastic assemblage of ornament were set upon the Heddus roll, so graphically described, it is easy to understand the denunciations of the time upon women's headgear. In no contemporary record or account, no matter who the writer, can be found such a vivacious and witty description of the modish hairdressing of that day as in the pages of this diary.