Edwin Waugh began his diary in May 1847, after pasting in a number of newspaper and other cuttings concerning the use of a diary, and the nature of the life the diary was designed to guide and build. For this man the confessional mode of the diary was a direct intervention in the world, a quite literal exemplification of the text constituting the world. The life that he aimed to build was above all a moral and spiritual life.

In his invocation of the magic of the book Waugh summons the presence of its high priests before beginning his own. ‘Reading makes a full man, conversation makes a ready man, and writing an exact man’, from Bacon's Essays, is followed by Emerson, ‘The main enterprise in the world for enterprise and extent is the upbuilding of man’ (as we shall see, Emerson the priest of education and improvement is for Waugh almost a god). Another tag he posts in the flyleaves of his diary is ‘More people have gone to the gibbet for want of early instruction, discipline and correction, than from any incurable depravity of nature.’ Waugh is Enlightenment man, the archetypal ‘working man’ autodidact in his belief that knowledge is the key to freedom.