Catharine Gould Scrapbook

Introduction

A photo of the Catharine Gould Scrapbook in the Kislak Center Reading Room

Tucked away in the corners of archives and special collection libraries are a number of old, handmade books that have baffled historians for decades. These books are often hidden under the guise of many names: scrapbooks, albums, commonplace books, blank books. Because these books were never published or circulated in the public sphere, they do not follow the rules and conventions that govern other printed books, providing little information about their production and making them difficult to catalog and understand. At the same time, because of their idiosyncratic and personal nature, these books provide readers with a fascinating glimpse into the inner lives of their makers, offering a snapshot of reading practices at the time of their making.

One such book is Ms. Codex 1860, otherwise cataloged as the Catharine Gould scrapbook, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. Less than one inch thick, the book is case-bound in lavish green leather and adorned with gold engravings. Inside we find clipped and pasted published poems and images along with a number of handiworks, including handwritten notes, hand drawings and paintings, feathers, pressed flowers and leaves, and locks of hair. Though unusual to modern readers, these items are also found in other well-documented historical scrapbooks like Elizabeth Reynolds's "A Medley" and Anne Wagner's "Memorials of Friendship."

The first page of the Catharine Gould scrapbook contains a handwritten note that provides one of the few clues about its provenance.

Penn Libraries purchased the Catharine Gould scrapbook at a 2017 auction at Cheffins, in Cambridge, United Kingdom with assistance from the Zachs-Adams Rare Book Fund, and it has since remained in the stacks. While the long history of how the book ended up at the auction remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, we could trace its provenance to a woman named Catharine Gould, who lived in Essex County in England from 1751 to 1829. There is not much information about her online aside from a will in which she bequeathed her manuscript books to her niece. Indeed, the first page of the scrapbook reads, "Charlotte Elizabeth Hasted from Dedham being the scrapbook made by her Aunt Catharine who died Feb. 6, 1829, aged 78 yrs.”

Even though there is little else we know about this particular book, the note from Charlotte Elizabeth Hasted provides us with abundant information to begin our investigation of the book. The note not only identifies it as a scrapbook, but situates us in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, at a time when we saw the proliferation of printed materials. Drawing from this information, let us now delve deeper into the Catharine Gould scrapbook and explore its personal, cultural, and historical significance.

History & Genre

An example of a commonplace book from the Beinecke Library, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It is difficult to place handmade books into genres because each book is different and the categories are changing as we speak. But because the writing on the front page identifies the book as a scrapbook, we might first consider it in light of the scrapbook genre. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first official use of the term “scrapbook” in 1825, though it has appeared prior to that date in private documents like the 1817 Elizabeth Reynolds scrapbook, which contains similar materials as the Catharine Gould scrapbook like feathers and watercolor paintings. Over time, scholars came to the general consensus that the term scrapbook refers to books with contents that have been cut and pasted in from other sources.

While the term scrapbook was new to the eighteenth century, the notion of "cutting and pasting" was not. In fact, the practice of taking content elsewhere and putting it in a new context was common in the manuscript culture of commonplace books. Commonplace books are books where people write down notable passages from other works and organize them under different categories. We could trace this practice of collecting and reproducing handwritten passages back to Cicero and Quintilian, who encouraged their students to write on an album, the Latin word for “white” that would come to refer to a blank tablet and later a blank book.

Even though both commonplace books and scrapbooks involve filling blank books or albums with materials found elsewhere, there is an important distinction: scrapbooks are most often associated with printed rather than handwritten materials. As a result, scrapbooks are often described as an “industrialized and democratized” form of the commonplace books. This is because as print became cheaper, even people who did not write were then able to preserve materials using scissors and glue. Due to the increased ease and access, people were also able to preserve a greater number and variety of sources than ever before.

Source & Content

The Norfolk Ladies Memorandum Book

Besides the unique handiworks in the scrapbook, most pages of the Catharine Gould scrapbook are filled with poems that are foreign to modern readers. These are not the famous poems that we know from eighteenth-century England. Rather, we find an electric mix of unfamiliar charades, enigmas, epigrams, and hymns excerpted from popular, ephemeral publications of the time, few of which are documented in digital repositories. Out of the 100+ poems I studied, I was able to find two obscure publications that match up with the clippings regarding their content, layout, and typeface: Volume 21 of The London Magazine, Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, and The Norfolk Ladies Memorandum Book; Or, Fashionable Pocket Repository For the Year 1793.

This is the norm and not the exception for scrapbooks in this period. In fact, book historian Ellen Gruber Garvey writes that in most of the scrapbooks she has studied, all the classics from the eighteenth century were absent. Rather, we find items from the “cheaper popular circulation” that are opposed to “the more centralized power of prestigious book and magazine publication." In fact, as the practice of scrapbooking became popular, we begin to find collections of poems that were sold as “book of scraps," intended to be cut out rather than read, studied, and taught to the next generation. Therefore, scrapbooks offer readers like us a fascinating glimpse into the other side of popular reading culture that we never knew about.

Because these books are ephemeral and sometimes meant to be taken apart, they are often produced with a low budget. We find that most of the poems in the Catharine Gould Scrapbook are printed with a stereotype caste on a thin paper. As a result, some texts are visible on the other side while others are faded or smudged. The papers themselves are also tinted with a blue color, which is reminiscent of the cheap blue books used for almanacs and record-keeping. Yet even though these books cost much less than the printed book that we are used to, such books were still expensive for the masses at the time. Therefore, most women who created scrapbooks come from the upper-middle class, and we might speculate that this is the case for Catharine Gould too.

Use & Rearrangement

In this picture of the Catharine Gould scrapbook, we can see several stubs down the middle in addition to shadows that the glue creates on the verso side from pasting in the leaves on the recto side.

Opening the covers and flipping through the Catharine Gould scrapbook, we could see that it was handled on a regular basis. The binding is fragile and some of the green paint is chipping off along the spine to reveal a yellow material underneath. Like all scrapbooks, it was not just read but also made, and we could find marks of its making throughout the pages. For example, the edges are uneven, suggesting that each item is hand-cut using scissors albeit with great care. All the items are then pasted into the scrapbook using copious amounts of glue, which crinkles the paper over time and offsets onto the next page to form a faint brown silhouette. There are also spots and streaks of dark brown throughout the scrapbook where glue was swiped or spilled onto the page. More than the other books in the libraries, scrapbooks are perhaps the most transparent in showcasing the human labor behind the pages.

In addition to flipping through and laboring over the scrapbook, the owner also attempted to reorganize and repurpose the book. For example, the items are numbered in the first few pages, but inconsistencies in some of these numbers suggest that items are later rearranged. There are also paper stubs throughout the book where two or three pages are cut out. Furthermore, the last few pages contain scribbles of years beginning from 1754, three years after Catharine Gould was born. Because these numbers are written close to the spine, we might deduce that the blank album was first fashioned as an account book for record keeping, but was later taken apart and rebound to form a scrapbook. All these signs highlight that like all handmade books, the Catharine Gould scrapbook is not a static but rather a flexible medium, evolving in tandem with the intentions of its maker.

Readership & Circulation

Even though the scrapbook is designated as the creation of one individual, we might speculate that other people in Catharine Gould’s life also read and contributed to it. This is because it was common for communities of women to collaborate on scrapbooks in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. In fact, there are several signs that the Catharine Gould scrapbook is the work of many hands. For example, we find different colors of hair on pages 203 and 211 and different handwriting on pages 135 and 143 of the scrapbook. In addition, women of the time often exchanged scrapbooks as tokens of friendship, offered them as gifts on special occasions, or passed them on as heirlooms, which is probable in this case considering the aforementioned note on the first page. Regardless, we might conclude that the scrapbook is intended for someone in the owner’s immediate social circle, in particular because it does not contain remarks that offer context clues or illuminate connections between items.

• 

  Page 203

• 

  Page 211

• 

  Page 135

• 

  Page 143

• 

  Page 82

• 

  Page 85

In fact, we might further speculate that the Catharine Gould scrapbook is produced as part of a fashionable exercise with scissors work, which was expected of accomplished women at the time. Scholars believe that scrapbooks are often created to show off the taste, learnedness, and artistic abilities of their female creators. Therefore, we might conclude that the Catharine Gould scrapbook is as much a means of self-expression as an emblem of social status and value. Indeed, there are several features that are more decorative than practical, like the thin bookmarks that are not strong enough to withstand multiple uses. In addition, we also find the same poems on different pages, like two identical excerpts from an untitled poem on pages 82 and 85. These duplicates suggest that the maker purchased multiple copies of the same publication to fill the pages, perhaps to create a pleasing aesthetic. Therefore, we might conclude that the scrapbook is intended less for personal reading and rereading but rather for social exhibition.

Authorship & Copyright

Page 156 of the Catharine Gould scrapbook, where we could see two different sections of a poem that are joined together.

Upon close examination of the poems in the scrapbook, it is interesting to note that most do not credit an author or include a title, and almost none references the date or source publication. While this might seem strange to modern readers, it is common for scrapbookers in the eighteenth century to “circumvent publishing, bypass copyrights, and freely cannibalize printed sources." In particular, it is important to note that the Statute of Anne introduced the first copyright law in the world not long before the making of this particular scrapbook, so the concept of copyright was still nascent and not well defined. As a result, publishers did not find themselves obligated to cite the source of their poems. In fact, it was common for newspapers and magazines at the time to reprint materials from one another without credits.

In addition to the lack of authorial attributions, texts are often taken out of their original contexts, excerpted from longer works, and altered in some fashion. One example is the poem “A String of Similes on a Swallow” on page 156, which is cut out into pieces and then rearranged, so that different sections of the poem are now joined together. In addition, we also note that the wording in the poem “charade” on page 32 is changed. Finally, the poem “On Childhood” on pages 43 and 231 is attributed to someone of the initials I. K. when digital records suggest that a man named George Coleridge wrote the poem. Together, these instances and inconsistencies suggest that the scrapbooker did not see published poems as inviolable works to be preserved in their original form, but as an experimental medium to exercise her own creative and artistic freedom.

Impact & Significance

Even though scrapbooks are often difficult to decode at first glance, they provide us with important information that we are not able to find in other published books. For example, the Catharine Gould scrapbook showcases the vast amount of ephemeral materials that women read in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, almost all of which are lost to time. In particular, these scrapbooks demonstrate how women during this time passed their leisure time and left their mark on the page, telling their stories through the words of other, often unnamed poets and writers. Scholars agree that the processes of reuse and remediation these women facilitated are in fact integral to the emergence of the mass print culture as we know it.

In the larger picture, the Catharine Could Scrapbook also provides a glimpse into how the scrapbook genre has revolutionized our interactions with books, for better or for worse. For example, scrapbooks changed reading from a passive to an active exercise, encouraging people of all backgrounds to intervene in the text and remediate it through their own interpretations. In addition, the emergence and propagation of scrapbooks marked the notable shift in the eighteenth century when reading changed from the "intensive" study of a few texts to the "extensive" survey of many texts. In the face of information overload from the mass volume of printed materials, scrapbooks provide readers of the time with the means to distill large quantities of materials and preserve the ones that are most meaningful to them.

While scrapbooks are important to the history of books and reading, they are not a thing of the past. In fact, the twenty-first century is seeing a renewed interest in scrapbooks as it becomes easier to find and print different items we find online or in our digital devices. In fact, we see legacies of the scrapbook in all walks of our digital lives. For example, the “cut and paste” functions of computer programs and applications reflect the long tradition of scrapbooks and scrapbook making. In particular, with its curated collection of aesthetic images and poems, the Catharine Gould scrapbook is reminiscent of a Pinterest board. All these traces of the scrapbook in the modern world are a testament to the enduring impact of scrapbooks on our mass media culture in the past, the present, and the future.