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This fascinating little book purports to be the diary of a Victorian boy gifted with the ability to see and talk with spirits of the dead as well as gnomes and fairies, and to see about the heads of persons he meets 'auras' curiously indicative of their psychological states. These
revelations of the occult, though it must be confessed that they carry more plausibility than most such productions, will not recommend the book to psychoanalysts. But it does deserve attention as one of the very few books that convey to us in the child's own words what childhood was like in an earlier time, and it tells us besides what the Victorian child observed and what he thought about matters supposed until Freud to be no concern of his. We learn, for example, about his overhearing a mysterious 'accident' suffered during the night by the newlyweds in the next room at the hotel. He speculates about the nature of adultery and why the maid was so suddenly fired by his parents. Always of such matters he knows nothing, yet somehow implies at the same time full understanding in a different part of his consciousness. Always his style is vivid and so full of a charming and indescribable naiveté as to bring conviction that the diary is genuine.
The boy, who seems to be about nine years old at the start of the journal, shows a taste for anal matters: flatus, 'rude' words, the nature of buttocks. His Sunday School teacher replied to this last question that she had never heard of them, and the same unfortunate lady, cornered by his insistence that she explain circumcision, told him she believed it meant removal of a piece of skin from the baby's forehead.
On November 17, 1885, we learn that,
There is something up with mamma. She has been staying in bed for breakfast. And today when we were in the dining room she was sick in the coal-box because she couldn't get to the closet in time… She is getting all fat about the middle like the Vicar…
December 23. She has got still fatter … I can'