Commonplace Books of Mourning

Abstract

AbstractThe final chapter argues that mourners turned to commonplace books to build a sense of presence by deploying tropes of representation developed at the intersection of album and commonplace-book cultures. I focus on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Butcher’s Books—long, thin, accounting books customarily used by butchers—which, I submit are both commonplace book and literary draft because, as a poet, Tennyson chose to organize commonplaces in stanzas that ultimately became In Memoriam. Tennyson’s Butcher’s Books absorb commonplace-book culture formally and also thematically, as Tennyson circulated commonplaces in his elegy and modeled a strategy of reading extractions as metonymic representations of the dead. This chapter also investigates less well-known collections including those kept by Tennyson’s daughter-in-law, Audrey Tennyson; the Hallam family; and Queen Victoria, who recorded extracts from In Memoriam that she associated with Prince Albert.