“Memorandums, of No Use to Any but the Owner”: Finding Value in Eighteenth-Century Pocket Memorandum Books

Abstract

In 1748, the London publisher Robert Dodsley pioneered a new contribution to the eighteenth-century print market: the pocket memorandum book. A forerunner of the modern-day Filofax, the pocket memorandum book was an annual publication that bundled together a variety of useful and entertaining printed information along with preformatted memorandums and accounts pages, left blank for their owner to fill in. The immense popularity of this genre in eighteenth-century Britain has not been reflected in modern scholarship on life-writing and autobiographical practice. This article explores the early evolution of the genre, and shows how individuals could use memorandum books to build up a storehouse of personal knowledge. In doing so, it recovers the contemporary value placed on the pocket memorandum book as indexical to a person’s life and, by extension, to their character.