The social world of a Dutch boy: The diary of Otto van Eck (1791-1796)

Autobiographies, diaries, personal letters — in short, any text that can be called an egodocument — enable historians to listen to the voices of the past in a direct way.1 Especially when there is no intermediary in the person of an editor, reading texts such as these is like having a conversation with the past. Autograph manuscripts that show the act of writing in ink spots or a trembling hand make emotions very visible. Discovering such a text can create what Johan Huizinga calls a historical sensation. This is what happened when we discovered the diary that eleven-year-old Otto van Eck started in 1790, which had been lost for two centuries in a large family archive. It enabled us to hear for the first time the voice of a child from the distant past. His diary, more than 1,500 pages long, is one of the first and most extensive kept by a child

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