Social Commonplace Books

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter argues that commonplace books were socially resonant spaces, where friends imagined, recorded, and negotiated relationships. I focus on how socially embedded knowledge takes shape in collaboratively produced Romantic manuscripts at the intersection of album and commonplace-book cultures. For example, the coterie surrounding John Keats and Leigh Hunt cultivated an ethos of community that made their commonplace books socially resonant spaces. Keats’s family collected samples of his handwriting while Leigh Hunt arranged samples of hair (including John Milton’s). This chapter ends with a study of 18 commonplace books kept by the “Sisterhood of Slade” (and their frequent companions, John Hamilton Reynolds, Benjamin Bailey, and James Rice), analyzing them as repositories of an embodied and situational knowledge.