LEAVING HOME

The honeymoon diary of Juliana Taylor Fuller almost perfectly embodies what I have argued was the central task of the Victorian honeymoon: the transfer from one kind of identity and identification to another. While in its content the diary neither holds out nor fulfills promises of intimate revelation, it adheres closely in its shape to the honeymoon's underlying story of transformation. The honeymoon diary is actually one of three accounts of journeys in the same album: Juliana and her husband honeymooned at Bath and Devon in 1866, traveled to Switzerland in 1867, and visited Wales in 1868.

The first – honeymoon – account is marked off from Juliana's narratives of the couple's subsequent journeys by a symmetrical frame of photographs – one on the first and one on the last page of the journal for 1866. The first photograph is of Grovelands, the home of Juliana's birth family; the second, of Hyde House, the ancestral home of her husband, John Stratton Fuller. At the very beginning of the diary, before the photograph, are two entwined locks of hair tied with blue ribbon. If we read along with the architecture of the diary, then, we can see the Fuller honeymoon not only as a journey to the touristic sites of the south of England but as a journey from one home, one family, to another.