On 17 December 1841, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. began
to keep a journal. He had just entered his twenty-seventh
year, and had been married less than four months; he had
opened his own law office a year and a quarter earlier. He
had published two books, and there was every indication
that a highly successful career lay open before him.

In 1842 Dana wrote the autobiographical sketch which
is here printed in its entirety for the first time. It was
designed as a rounding-out of his journal; it filled in the
background material, according to his own memory and
selection, for that part of his life which antedated his daily
notations of what had transpired.

It is curious that so little use has been made of Dana's
journal, and particularly that his autobiographical sketch
has not hitherto been printed. Charles Francis Adams drew
heavily on the diary (as well as on Dana's correspondence)
in writing his life of Dana which appeared in 1890. Indeed,
the biography consists largely of selections from the jour-
nal, with links supplied by Adams. Several others have used
passages from the sketch and journal, but the great mass
of the material still lies fallow in the collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society. That the papers of Dana
will someday be printed in extenso seems inevitable: he is
the Boswell of Boston, in a sense, and his journal, letters,
and speeches provide a key to the social, literary, and
political history of Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth
century.

The prose style of Dana's autobiographical sketch
has the same qualities which are found in Two Years Before
the Mast. Crisp, sinewy, and direct, the narrative flows
swiftly and cleanly. At times, when the author hurried on
to his next point, the record becomes almost telegraphic.
There are evidences of at least two revisions by the author,
made at widely posterior dates; but these interpolations
are in the form of annotations and extensions--the general
flow of the autobiography was never changed.

Apart from the vivid pictures we receive of educa-
tional experiences in the early years of the last century,

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