Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority

Abstract

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, commonplacing was a habitual practice of middle-class US households, undertaken by children and adults alike to record notable quotations and to cultivate their literary taste. Though it declined in popularity with the rise of the scrapbook in the midcentury, commonplacing was for centuries a standard feature of both educational curricula and domestic literacy, with generations of students instructed in the intellectual and moral benefits of selecting and copying passages culled from reading. Commonplace books offer a wealth of vital information about US literary culture, for they not only illuminate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading practices by allowing us to discern what US readers valued in various genres, but they also help to document what middle-class and well-to-do Americans were reading. In showing that many Americans were attentively reading and excerpting the works of such less remembered figures as Caroline Sheridan Norton, Charles A. Sprague, and Edward Young, these books may even be said to reveal an alternative canon of nineteenth-century national reading preferences. In addition, commonplace books also affirm the particular status of the quotation, which was so prized that readers dedicated much of their time to the selection and transcription of select passages. According to Barbara Benedict, these handpicked excerpts revealed both the reader’s taste in as well as his or her eye for a well-chosen phrase or a keen observation, and as evinced by the frequency with which commonplacers exchanged and commented on each other’s selections, readers could readily expect to be judged for their choice of quotations (51).