Priscilla Wordsworth’s Pocketbook Diaries and Interfaces of Subjectivity

Abstract

Abstract Pocketbook diaries were one of the most pervasive platforms for autobiography in Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The relative standardization of the genre’s bibliographic and textual elements encouraged users to record their lives in discrete day-by-day blocks and their finances in neat columns. As culturally ubiquitous interfaces, pocketbooks had the potential to shape the records that users wrote in them as well as, this article argues, users themselves. I draw on the case study of Priscilla Wordsworth’s pocketbooks from the early 1800s, contextualizing them alongside other largely unknown female diarists from the period. I show that, in addition to the content of diary entries, the way Wordsworth and others interact with the material and cultural expectations of their pocketbooks reveals much about pocketbooks’ affordances and their potential to influence their users. This article suggests that the interfaces that people used might affect not only their interactions with a particular interface—such as a pocketbook—but also their sense of self. Employing theories of interface design often applied to digital media, this article offers connections between old and new media and within scholarship on media studies, book history, and material culture.