Commonplace book

Abstract

Commonplace books were blank albums that were used to transcribe favorite passages of literature by hand. In the Victorian era they began to include not only transcribed poems, homilies and prayers but also a wide range of media such as sketches, pressed flowers, autographs, and magazine cut‐outs. At this time they were particularly popular with middle‐class women, who used their carefully curated commonplace book to display their literary tastes, education, travels, and social circle. Commonplace books have often been dismissed as largely sentimental and contrived, but recent critics have argued that they represented a very “active” way of reading that potentially undermined copyright and challenged commercial publishing practices. By the mid‐eighteenth commonplace books had fallen out of fashion and were for the most part replaced by preprinted albums and scrapbooks.