Parson Woodforde's Diaries, edited by John Beresford, were first published by OUP in the 1920s as a 5-volume series. In 1935 a single volume condensation was issued covering the whole timespan of the diaries with the original title Woodforde : Passages from the five volumes of The Diary of a Country Parson 1758 - 1802 - later changed to The Diary of a Country Parson 1758-1802. This same text was later issued in hardback under the World's Classics label and then in 1978 as an Oxford University Paperback. It has been reprinted many times since then.

In 1985 a new edition was published by Century Press in association with the OUP under the editorship of James Michie, reduced in length "with the intention of making Woodforde much more accessible to today's general reader". This edition was profusely illustrated by artists of the Norwich School and had a brief foreword by John Julius Norwich and an informative introduction by Robert Blythe. The title used was A Country Parson. James Woodforde's Diary 1759-1802.

To complicate matters further another selection of diary entries, edited by David Hughes and illustrated by Ian Stephens has been published by the Folio society.

These three works are sufficiently different to stand apart - please do not combine them.