Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace
book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection
"Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace
books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his
"Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century
commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook
and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how
technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing,
and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the
commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took
on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of
print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than
copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300
manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of
well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and
their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the
first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge
developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while
the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and
Victorians organize people.
Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century
commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue:
diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries
signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as
empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally
produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge
(Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning
(Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of
commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.
