What is The Victorian Character Commonplace Project?
A commonplace book is a personal collection of quotations, scraps of information, and sometimes illustrations, popular from the sixteenth to the early-twentieth centuries.
Because commonplace books were created to reflect their authors’ individual tastes and interests, the contents could vary greatly. For example, Tom Standage, author of Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2000 Years, notes, “Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches.” The handmade scrapbook in which Harriet Smith collects riddles and charades in Jane Austen’s Emma may be considered a commonplace book. Such books could be shared among friends and family, passed from hand to hand.
Standage argues that commonplace books served not merely as aides to memory or sources of inspiration but also means of “self-definition”: “which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality.”
Throughout the years, many noted authors have kept commonplace books. (You can see a lovely selection in this article from The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/08/16/beautiful-commonplace-books-by-lewis-carroll-nancy-cunard-and-more-photos.html). But what would happen if their characters did so as well?
That is the question that students at Ball State University set out to explore in this project. If the characters from Victorian novels had kept commonplace books, what might they have chosen to collect? And, if a commonplace book is “a reflection of your character and personality,” as Standage claims, what light could we shed on these characters in relation to their socio-historical context by creating commonplace books for them?
Reference:
Standage, Tom. “How Commonplace Books were Like Tumblr and Pinterest.” tomstandage.com, 9 May 2013. Web. 26 April 2015. http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/how-commonplace-books-were-like-tumblr-and-pinterest/
Two Other Links We Found Useful When Creating Our Commonplace Books:
Kelsey McKinney, “Social Media: Nothing New? Commonplace Books As Predecessor to Pinterest”: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/social-media-nothing-new-commonplace-books-as-predecessor-to-pinterest.html#
Theryn Fleming, “Keeping a Commonplace Book”: http://www.toasted-cheese.com/absolute-blank/12-11/
-- Joyce Huff
Because commonplace books were created to reflect their authors’ individual tastes and interests, the contents could vary greatly. For example, Tom Standage, author of Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2000 Years, notes, “Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches.” The handmade scrapbook in which Harriet Smith collects riddles and charades in Jane Austen’s Emma may be considered a commonplace book. Such books could be shared among friends and family, passed from hand to hand.
Standage argues that commonplace books served not merely as aides to memory or sources of inspiration but also means of “self-definition”: “which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality.”
Throughout the years, many noted authors have kept commonplace books. (You can see a lovely selection in this article from The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/08/16/beautiful-commonplace-books-by-lewis-carroll-nancy-cunard-and-more-photos.html). But what would happen if their characters did so as well?
That is the question that students at Ball State University set out to explore in this project. If the characters from Victorian novels had kept commonplace books, what might they have chosen to collect? And, if a commonplace book is “a reflection of your character and personality,” as Standage claims, what light could we shed on these characters in relation to their socio-historical context by creating commonplace books for them?
Reference:
Standage, Tom. “How Commonplace Books were Like Tumblr and Pinterest.” tomstandage.com, 9 May 2013. Web. 26 April 2015. http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/how-commonplace-books-were-like-tumblr-and-pinterest/
Two Other Links We Found Useful When Creating Our Commonplace Books:
Kelsey McKinney, “Social Media: Nothing New? Commonplace Books As Predecessor to Pinterest”: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/social-media-nothing-new-commonplace-books-as-predecessor-to-pinterest.html#
Theryn Fleming, “Keeping a Commonplace Book”: http://www.toasted-cheese.com/absolute-blank/12-11/
-- Joyce Huff