Come, gentle reader – Study and refine your appetite, learn to live upon instruction, feast your mind and mortify your flesh, shut your mouth and chew the cud of your Understanding. (attributed to the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus)
These days, if we come across something that interests us and that we want to remember, we bookmark it in our browsers, or we Pin it, or save-to-file. We scan it, or quicker still, grab a photo on our phone – a photo that we can send out into the world for endless viewing and duplication. Sometimes we even cut-and-paste it, or (if you are me and essentially a Luddite) you print it out. (I have been around museums long enough to know that the only technology that lasts over the long term is paper). We have no shortage of duplicative technologies, and it’s not even cost-effective anymore for a company to make a printer that isn’t an all-in-one printer-scanner-copier. Three major technologies, all in one small box. Eat your heart out, Gutenberg!
But I spend my days surrounded by proof that these helpful gizmos are a lot less durable than pen-and-ink. Before smartphones, before copiers, even before typewriters and carbon paper – from less than a century ago and reaching back millennia, if you wanted to remember something you wrote it down.
In the past, the place you wrote all this down was often the ‘commonplace book.’ The commonplace book is what we would call today a Scrapbook – a book or folder in which you copied down or pasted in clippings that you wanted to find again or remember. For many, it was also a place to note down the ideas that these clippings inspired. Keeping a commonplace book goes back to antiquity. The Roman orator Cicero kept a commonplace book with quotes and sayings that he would incorporate into later speeches. Leonardo da Vince kept one (and no doubt doodled fabulous inventions in the margins). Isaac Newton worked out the calculus in his commonplace books. Henry David Thoreau was a champion – his “Indian Notebooks,” in which he recorded the information that he read or observed about Native Americans, ran to 3000 pages and are estimated at 500,000 words. Commonplace books became especially popular in the19th century.
We recently came across an interesting commonplace book in our collections. Joseph Russell of Needham compiled a book, starting in 1841. We know, because it says “Joseph Russell 1841” on the flyleaf. And that is just about the only thing we do know about Joseph Russell. There are birth records for seven children of Joseph and Rebeccah Russell, born between 1830 and 1844, which is the right time period. There is a Joseph Russell who paid taxes in town in the 1850s, also about right. The 1856 Walling map of Needham shows two properties belonging to Joseph Russell in West Needham (now Wellesley), one on what is now Grove Street, and one on Cartwright Road (which was then known as Russell Place or Russell Street). Next door on Grove Street is also a property belonging to Joseph H Russell, one of the children of Joseph and Rebeccah in the birth list. Another son, William L, fought in the Civil War in Company C, 43d Regiment (the “Needham Tigers”).
Read slowly, pause frequently, think seriously, keep cleanly, return duly, with the corners of the leaves not turned down. (from a 19th century bookplate)
Whatever else we can gather about Joseph Russell comes from the texts and quotes that he copied into his commonplace book. Although it seems that few (if any) of the entries are original works, the choice of what to record is as personal as a diary.
Many of the entries are pious standards, such as Washington Irving’s poem “The Grave” (“Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error – covers every defect – extinguishes every resentment!”), which was a frequently-read text at funerals. Aphorisms like “Virtue ennobles the character of a man, but vice destroys it,” “Beauty unaccompanied by active virtue is like a fine flower without perfume, a body without a soul…” and other such worthy (and, can I say it? – commonplace) sentiments.
There is also a hefty helping of the sentimental, like the parlor ballad “Meet Me By Moonlight,” written by Joseph Augustus Wade and Franklin Peale (Philadelphia, 1830): “Meet me by moonlight alone / And then I will tell you a tale… / You must promise to come – for I said / I would show the night flow’rs their queen…” (This is not the same song as the Carter Family’s 1928 prison ballad, “Meet Me by the Moonlight,” though they are often confused for each other.) Or Irish poet and playwright Richard Sheridan’s “I Sigh for the Days that are Gone” (“No more shall the spring my lost pleasures restore / Uncheer’d I still wander alone…”). In fact, there is a whole section of parlor ballads (“Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “Hurrah for the Emerald Isle,” “Seek Not with Gold or Glitt’ring Gem,” “The Invincibles,” and others), and several have notes in the margin about music (“light guitar” or “with longbow”). No doubt some of the long evenings in the Russell parlor were enlivened with singing sentimental songs.
This might lead you to think that Joseph Russell was a romantic – but you would be wrong. A surprising number of the entries, especially those that deal with Marriage, are cynical bordering on misogynistic, or as one of his quotes would say: “Men dying make their wills – why cannot wives? Because wives have their will throughout their lives.” Har har. A number of poems included in the book are complaints about wives – “Help!” (about the chaos caused when Wife tries to clean house), “The Henpecked” (speaks for itself), and “Wouldn’t You?” (“At your door your woman meets you / Young ones all join in one yell. Tenderly the broomstick greets you. Don’t you wish yourself in ——– Jersey?”) That last one was introduced with the following prologue: “The following must have been written by some confirmed old bachelor. No young man could have written it, and no married man would have dared to.” All I can say is, I hope that the Russells had a comfortable doghouse.
In fact, nearly half of the book is given over to humor, even if we would not find it humorous these days. Some is just pure satire, and still pretty funny even now. Others we would find offensive – from the clichéd Dutch/German accent of “Hans’s Song” (“I vants to marry – yes I does…”) to the outright and appallingly racist.
Where did Russell find this material? It encompasses a broad range of periods and genres. Did his library, or the Needham schools, cover material from Epictetus to 19th century comic dialect poetry? Probably not. It is most likely that Russell subscribed to one or more of the “Almanacs” that were popular in the 19th century. Periodicals like Poor Old Robin. An Almanack Composed… of a Variety of Subjects, both Ancient and Modern, for the Reader’s Further Entertainment, or The Whitehall Joker, a Semi-Monthly Journal Devoted to Facts, Fun, etc. etc. My vote goes to The Cruet Stand: Select Pieces of Prose and Poetry, with Anecdotes, Enigmas, Etc. (“From Grave to Gay, from Lively to Severe.”) – several of the passages in Russell’s commonplace that I was able to identify (thank you, Google!) came from this periodical. However, these citations can be found over a wide range of years, showing that these periodicals recycled material from each other over and over, and many of the more popular quotes were widely available from numerous sources.
Almanacs like these were popular reading material in the 18th and 19th centuries. Unless you were wealthy, it is unlikely that you owned a great many books. Libraries at the time were private and open only to paid members. For a middle-class reader in a small town (say, Joseph Russell), almanacs provided a wider range of material than would have been otherwise available. And that was their purpose – they were, in essence, published commonplace books.
I’ll just end this with some words I can certainly endorse –
“Writing is the soul of commerce, the messenger of thought, the picture of the past, and the regulator of the future.” (from Chauncey Bascombe’s System of Penmanship, 1830)
