Thraliana

The Thraliana was a diary kept by Hester Thrale and is part of the genre known as table talk. Although the work began as Thrale's diary focused on her experience with her family, it slowly changed focus to emphasise various anecdotes and stories about the life of Samuel Johnson. The work was used as a basis for Thrale's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, but the Thraliana remained unpublished until 1942. The anecdotes contained within the work were popular with Thrale's contemporaries but seen as vulgar. Among 20th century readers, the work was popular, and many literary critics believe that the work is a valuable contribution to the genre and for providing information about Johnson's and her own life.

Hester Thrale, when still Hester Lynch Salusbury, spent her youth writing letters and keeping journals. Her talents at writing won her the respect of her uncles, Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Salusbury, who later appointed her their heir. When Thrale was older, she became close to Johnson. It was natural to her to keep a detailed collection of anecdotes and stories of their time together, as of everything she experienced. The two initially bonded after Thrale gave birth to her first child, Queeney, in 1766.

However, there were problems between Thrale and Johnson, along with "his defenders" during his life and in criticism since then, over their "gradual estrangement" from each other after the death of her husband. These problems were then heightened by her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi. After Johnson's death, Thrale felt isolated because she believed that Johnson's previous friends along with the public as a whole did not accept her, and some went so far as to claim she abandoned Johnson in his final moments. In particular, James Boswell, who resented Thrale and felt himself as her literary competitor, began to exploit the falling out between Thrale and Johnson's friends in order to promote his Life of Samuel Johnson.

After the birth of Queeney, Thrale began to document the various moments in her daughter's life in a "baby book" called The Children's Book. The work eventually expanded to include documentation of the whole family and was retitled the Family Book. To encourage his wife's writing her husband Henry Thrale gave her six blank diary books, with the title Thraliana on the cover, in 1776. The work was intended as an Ana, which she admits her fascination with in the Thraliana: "I am grown quite mad after these French Anas; Anecdote is in itself so seducing". After searching for English models for writing her Ana, she settled on used John Selden's Table Talk, William Camden's Remains, and Joseph Spence's Anecdotes as her guides. In May 1778, she was given by Johnson a manuscript of Spence's Anecdotes, but her first years of the Ana were written without an exact model.

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