The Rush Hawkins Scrapbooks and Book-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Deidre Lynch

How to Get Italy into Books

Through the nineteenth century, books sent Americans on Italian journeys. And Americans—including the individuals from the Brown family whom this essay will treat—got ever more determined to get the Italy they encountered on these journeys inside of their books. They found various ways to exploit the affordances of the codex-form book as they pursued that goal.

After the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, a “living avalanche” of tourists, as one observer complained, tumbled down the Alps and headed for Italy.¹ Books were praised and blamed for instigating this tourism: through the century, as the crowds of visitors grew, cheap print assisted in democratizing the older tradition of the Grand Tour, formerly monopolized by classically educated, aristocratic, European men. As every student of the literary movement called Romanticism knows, many of the books so blamed were the works of Lord Byron—a classically educated, aristocratic European man, to be sure, but one unusually adept at using the apparatus of modern publishing to engage a mass audience. Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage first made publishing history as the first modern bestseller and then launched many a foreigner’s Italian journey, taken in quixotic imitation of the fourth (1818) canto of its narrative.² Byron had sent the restless, haunted Harold, a feebly disguised version of his peripatetic creator, careening across Europe, bearing all the while, “With haughty scorn that mock’d the smart,/ . . . / The pageant of his bleeding heart,” as a later English poet, Matthew Arnold, put it acerbically.³

By the 1830s the same publishing house that had brought out Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in edition after edition was also publishing edition after edition of guidebooks for tourists in which details about must-see landmarks in Rome and Venice were begemmed with quotations from Byron’s (and others’) verses about them. Such books remorselessly instrumentalized modern works of literature for a burgeoning tourist industry. The itineraries they recommended were tailored for lovers of literature, giving them the means both to follow in authors’ footsteps and to connect their readerly experience of fictional worlds and people to the real world they themselves were looking at and walking within. The Trevi Fountain in Rome, for instance, merits a lengthy description in one House of Murray handbook not only as an admirable feat of Baroque engineering, but also as the setting of an episode in the wildly popular novel Corinne or Italy: “This fountain is the spot where Corinne came to meditate by moonlight, when she was suddenly surprised by seeing the reflection of Oswald in the water,” the author states, assuming that this reference to characters in a work of fiction that the Swiss-French author Germaine de Staël had published in 1807 required no contextualization.⁴

From the middle of the nineteenth century on, American-authored books began to supplement Byron’s verses and Staël’s novel as the lenses Americans chose to gaze through as they encountered Italy’s storied ground. Borrowing from Corinne both its romantic themes and a narrative framework in which one character repeatedly teaches another about the art history gathered up in Rome’s museums and churches, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, for instance, came to serve, almost immediately following its 1860 publication, as a novelistic supplement to guidebooks more oriented to matters of fact. Hawthorne’s example demonstrates how Americans’ Italian journeys, so often instigated by their reading matter, led them to compose books in their turn (with his family in tow, Hawthorne had taken an eighteen-month tour of Italy in 1858–9).⁵ Travelogues—recording travelers’ sundry Impressions, Visits, Tours, Ramblings, etc—were a staple of the nineteenth-century book market in America, as they were across the Atlantic. They offered many Americans their entrée into authorship.

But we do not often enough recall that many American visitors to Italy made books, in addition to writing, publishing, and printing them. In the last part of the century, tourists in Rome developed, for instance, a new use for the printed copies of The Marble Faun that they purchased as mementoes of their journeys. Participating in the popular mode of handicraft known as extra-illustration, they first curated a selection of photographic prints that pictured the landmarks, the paintings, and the types of Roman people that Hawthorne’s novel referenced, and then had Italian booksellers mount these prints, at appropriate locations, on blank sheets that were interleaved among the printed pages of their Tauchnitz editions of the book. As the final step in this transformation of the printed novel, the bookseller would install it, thickened now by this set of pictorial annotations, within a new, sumptuous binding. Such bespoke copies of The Marble Faun survive in abundance in twenty-first-century rare book libraries, but no two copies are exactly alike. Each has been remade as a book that, even while it is about the three members of Rome’s artists’ colony who are Hawthorne’s fictional protagonists, is also, in its modified state, about its maker’s personal experience of Rome. This supplementing and customizing together create a book that keeps its owner’s unique memories as well as its author’s work. That owner has effectively made the novel into a platform for her photograph album.⁶ This sidelining of the novelist is one reason such extra-illustrated volumes accommodate the methods of the book historian better than they do those of the literary historian.

The one-of-a-kind volumes to which this book-historical essay now turns, volumes that likewise involve the curation of Italian mementoes, represent additional reminders that the printed, published volume—manufactured in the nineteenth century on an industrial scale, disseminated in print runs of identical multiples—does not by any means exhaust the meanings that clustered within nineteenth-century ideas of “the book.” (Since many of us in the twenty-first century encounter books—the present, born-digital one included—not as objects of paper, ink, and glue, but as pixels flickering on screens, quasi-objects that are distributed across digital platforms and networks and devices, such reminders of books’ plural nature and unstable ontology ought not to take us by surprise.) This essay considers, in succession, two “books” that have been in the possession of Brown University’s John Hay Library for close to a century: a volume consisting mainly of manuscript materials, bits and pieces of loose paper which appear to have been saved and gathered up by Nicholas Brown III and his wife Caroline (Carrie) Clements Brown in the middle of nineteenth century; and a second volume, titled “Universal Republican Alliance Scrapbook, 1835–1877,” which was put together a couple of decades later by their granddaughter Annmary Brown’s husband, the Union Army colonel Rush Hawkins. The latter includes some materials that appear to have originated in the Browns’ collections, but in the main assembles newspaper clippings and other pieces of print.

The later-nineteenth-century American who purchased and extra-illustrated The Marble Faun was providing herself with a scaled-down, portable museum of Italian art works that she could carry back to America. In an analogous way, the scrapbooks associated with the Browns and Hawkins served them as unofficial archival repositories. Like other scrapbooks, these books are testament to the lengths that many nineteenth-century Americans would go to to ensure that memory work would not be an enterprise monopolized by state institutions and academic libraries. The memory work of these volumes documents the Brown family’s connections with the Italian Risorgimento, presenting the members of this family as both participants in history and (by virtue of their diligence with scissors and paste) history’s preservers. They mingle together the large-scale political transformations they reference with family feeling. The boundary between historical document and personal memento, public memory and familial anecdote, is fluid here.

The books can certainly be mined for information about nineteenth-century Americans’ engagement in Italian history, but I find in them another sort of evidential value. They can also illuminate nineteenth-century Americans’ attitudes to books and book-making. In this essay, therefore, I will not be “reading” these two books for their contents—one suspects that they were never actually intended to be read through, cover to cover—but instead will be trying to bring into view the principles, the historically-specific understanding of the affordances of the codex form, that would have informed their assembly.

Museums, Cabinets, Collections, and Recollections

In a more literal sense than usual, memories of Italy are inside these two books in the Hay Library. The books offer, as I noted, insights into Italian matters, but they also preserve Italian matter. Within these originally blank books, cut-and-paste methods have been used to affix to their pages a variety of materials—handwritten letters, printed pamphlets, newspaper clippings, and print ephemera such as visiting cards and tickets and menus. This pair of volumes remind us that the codex form can be valued not just for the semantic content that books convey, but also because, as objects that can have contents as well as content, books are handy storage containers. (We remember this all over again every time we happen upon the ticket or receipt we have been using as a makeshift bookmark.) These volumes remind us that, as indulged by the scrapbooker, recollection also involves collection—and frequently the collection of real, tangible things. One often encounters, gathered up between scrapbook covers, diverse material remnants of past moments: a ticket that someone once held in her hand and displayed to another in order to gain entry to the concert or ball that marked a red-letter day in her life; a desiccated violet or pressed rose, plucked as a souvenir of someone’s pilgrimage to the poet Percy Shelley’s grave in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.⁷ This book form organizes, harbors, and protects these things, placing them alongside the texts it preserves for reading in the years to come. It ensures things’ survival so that, in the years to come, people can both see and handle them (touch their surfaces and turn the pages to which they are affixed) and so participate anew in the haptic pleasures that are basic to the production of a scrapbook.⁸

Rush Hawkins, who took charge of these books’ accession into the Brown University collections, expended considerable wealth on the bibliophilic pursuits that he shared with many late-nineteenth century American gentlemen, his wife’s uncle, John Carter Brown, included. Over the last decades of his long life, Hawkins amassed an acclaimed collection of incunabula—rare books from the first decades of printing in fifteenth-century Europe—and deposited many of these treasures in the museum-like setting of the Annmary Brown Memorial. Before the sudden death of his wife, he had even planned to name this building the Gutenberg Memorial, in tribute to the early printers (in the Eurocentric historical framework of Hawkins’s time, Johannes Gutenberg was identified as the fifteenth-century father of the printed book.)⁹ With the help of Alfred W. Pollard, the bibliographer who edited the journal The Library, Hawkins also honored his collection with a catalogue: Catalogue of Books Mostly from the Presses of the First Printers Showing the Progress of Printing with Movable Metal Types through the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century, printed by Oxford University Press, at Hawkins’s cost, in 1910. Hawkins’ reputation for connoisseurship—the epitaph he authored for his tombstone mentions his “love of the beautiful”—is interestingly in friction with the care that he took over the battered, unbeautiful books that are at the center of this essay.

As a bibliophile, Hawkins may have been the first to admit that his decades-long devotion to scrapbooking was an investment in a category of things that, by some measures, scarcely qualified as books at all. When they are consigned to libraries and archives for safe-keeping, many of the scrapbooks, commonplace books, and friendship albums created by nineteenth-century book-makers end up catalogued as “family papers,” a categorization that undercuts their pretensions to bookish status.

The language used in the 1927–28 annual report that lauds their acquisition by Brown University similarly calls into question the bookhood of one of the books at the heart of this essay. The report refers to “two portfolios” of materials associated with Nicholas and Carrie Brown’s time during the former’s diplomatic service in Rome. That word almost suggests that, in the name of expediency, those materials had simply been shuffled temporarily into two portable—and perhaps disposable—carrying cases. Indeed, shortly after this report was written, whatever integrity that each of the two scrapbooks possessed as a book was negated when someone, presumably an individual with official duties in the library who was intent on saving shelf-space, decided to combine the contents of the two volumes. It is as a single scrapbook that the Browns’ handicraft survives today; there is no saying whether that consolidation led to some of the materials they had saved being discarded.

It is true that, when we fold them into the history of record-keeping, many of the blank books that Americans filled up during the nineteenth century might well strike us as resembling rudimentary filing cabinets rather than books, at least as we normally understand those media objects. Before manufacturers of office furniture took out patents for the filing cabinet in the 1890s, and before exponents of so-called “scientific housekeeping” promoted the use of these devices for organizing papers in the home, the codex was one of the chief storage devices available to both places of business and private households.¹⁰ Books had been basic office equipment for centuries. In their guise as letter books and ledgers, they were used for keeping track of correspondence and receipts, even though this method of record-keeping did not make for speedy retrieval of the records so deposited. “Family books,” as they were sometimes called, were likewise brought into existence through informal, improvised filing techniques, and then passed from one generation to the next, often alongside family Bibles (which had their own record-keeping functions). In the pages of such volumes, as the book historian Margaret J. M. Ezell observes, records of rents collected can be found jostling with alphabet exercises and with transcriptions of poetic extracts and recipes.¹¹

Nicholas and Carrie Brown’s books appear to have sometimes been used for these homely purposes. A receipt from April 1848 for the linens used in their apartments in Rome can, for instance, be found on one page, and so, on others, can a valentine from 1830; some calling cards; Carrie Brown’s pencil sketches from 1837 of horses and of a ruined Christian shrine—all of this jumbled up with the sundry letters and documents through which one can trace the unfolding of the Roman revolution of 1849. One understands why, in 1927, the Brown University librarians reached for the word portfolio: some pages in this scrapbook prompt the thought that almost anything might have been put into it.

We might array book-forms on a spectrum, with the kind of books that we read through in a linear fashion positioned at the one end, and, at the other, these family books that serve as receptacles for records and mementoes, and which ask us to dip into them rather than read them. In doing so, we will probably locate the Brown scrapbook at the latter end. Alternately, assessed for what it tells us about the history of collecting more broadly construed, the Browns’ scrapbook might aptly be aligned with an earlier domestic object created by Americans who aimed to create an enduring memento of their Italian experiences. When, in 1833, the family of the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper returned to central New York state following a European sojourn of six years, Cooper, and later his children, decided to use the surfaces of a pair of room-divider screens formed of pine as a decoupage display space that would memorialize their travels. The one known as the Italian Screen consists of fifteen panels (six now lost) that Cooper adorned himself, making them the mounts for his collection of landscape prints imaging the places in Italy the family had visited in 1829–30. The Memento Screen, also consisting of fifteen panels, was the work of the five Cooper children, who for their collaging claimed their father’s unused landscape prints and then supplemented them, in a multi-media mix, with pictures they had scissored out of literary annuals like The Amulet and The Token, with handwritten letters of invitation they had received from celebrities they had encountered in London and in Rome (e.g., the English poet Samuel Rogers, the Roman prince and brother-in-law to Napoleon, Camillo Borghese), and with these acquaintances’ printed calling cards.¹²

Like the Browns after them, who also pasted into their book(s) invitations, calling cards, and thank-you notes to Carrie Brown from her guests, the Coopers aimed to archive sociability.¹³ Their Memento Screen, in particular, might be considered an overgrown scrapbook-- one that has been shifted from a horizontal to a vertical plane, so that the beholder/reader must walk around it rather than look down upon it. But there is another way of thinking about the resemblance that links the Browns’ scrapbook to these screens. That resemblance might, conversely, indicate how, by virtue of its commitment to its makers’ collecting, a scrapbook pushes up against the conceptual limits of the book.

What (Real) Books Can Do

And yet the scrapbookers of the nineteenth century placed great faith in the dignifying and legitimizing power of the codex. To them, this material form seemed capable of elevating the scatter of minor papery materials it enclosed into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If the Italian journeys that Americans took after 1815 represent a democratization of the ancien régime tradition of the Grand Tour, nineteenth-century America’s embrace of amateur book-making instances a parallel transformation, in which the formerly elite practice of collecting was likewise opened up to new populations, at the same time that long-held ideas about what kinds of objects should be accumulated and preserved were also being modified. The modes of book-keeping—as Fabio Moratito calls them—that the codex form supported were pivotal for these developments.¹⁴ That importance calls into question the argument that Brown University librarian was tacitly making when, with the word portfolios, he suggested that the enclosures that had gathered up the Browns’ materials were incidental to the value of those materials. The cultural historian Ellen Gruber Garvey counters that suggestion, too, when she writes of how American scrapbookers were determined to “dignify [their] clippings with the prestige of a bound book” and writes of how the deposit into a book of those scissored-out pieces of newsprint enabled those scrapbookers to separate the value of their materials from their “ephemerality.”¹⁵ It was important for people that the receptacle in which they housed their collections was a book, because, within their culture, the book represented an instrument of salvage work. It could redeem from the wastepaper basket both the evanescent materials of everyday social life (the receipts and the missives that the Browns’ volume, as already noted, keeps as souvenirs) and the news of the day that technically was not supposed to outlive its day (the clippings that, as we will see, fill up Rush Hawkins’s “Universal Republican Alliance Scrapbook”).¹⁶

In the first half of the century, in another testimony to the value that the material book possessed in and of itself, people sometimes equipped the blank books they used for their collecting with title pages that they had either wrought by hand or bought from commercial stationers. Through this means they sought to bring their handiwork into conformity with the codes defining the information architecture and layout of printed books. “A Medley or Scrapbook,” for instance, a blank book so titled which a certain Elizabeth Reynolds filled up with snipped out fashion illustrations and handwritten excerpts of popular poetry in England early in the nineteenth century, boasts one such title page: on it, below that title, Reynolds has written “Volume 1/ Coppice House/ Published by Elizabeth Reynolds. 1817”—an amateur’s facsimile of the publishers’ colophon required to identify a real book.¹⁷

Autographomania

There was a paradox at the heart of the culture of scrapbooking, however. It was recognized that, as an artefact of mechanical reproduction, the printed book was incapable of doing justice to what seemed most valuable about both the handwritten materials pasted into the scrapbook’s pages and the pieces of handwriting inscribed directly onto the surfaces of those pages. In the first half of the nineteenth century especially, to make a scrapbook or leaf through one was an exercise in pondering the difference between the printed and the written word, between the reproduced or reproducible and the one-of-a-kind. And the pieces of handwriting preserved on scrapbook pages were cherished for the opportunities for contact that they offered those who handled them, who were invited to touch the very surfaces that the famous, or the dead, or the friends from whom one had been otherwise separated had touched themselves.

The three pieces of inscribed paper affixed to the first page of the Browns’ volume suggest from the start how this kind of logic of the relic has informed this book’s creation. At the top, there are anonymous handwritten verses on a united Italy, with a now illegible signature; in the middle, more verses, these in the hand of the poet Giuseppe Gaspare Mezzofanti and with his signature and the words “Rome 1849” appended (another poem in Cardinal Mezzofanti’s hand, as well as the address panel of a letter that is addressed to “Madame Brown,” can be found elsewhere in the scrapbook); and at the bottom, a battered, much creased portion of a letter from 1813. Unfold the latter paper and you read beneath it the notation “supposed to be the writing of Alexander I [the emperor of Russia] as it was found after the battle of Leipzig”: the phrasing, “found after the battle,” underscores how, as a relic, this bit of paper brings a history-maker and the historical event in which he was involved up close. (And the suggestion of happenstance implied by “found” fortifies the sense that this humble object is the real thing—premeditation played no part when this sample of the Tsar’s handwriting was secured.)

When, in 1928, the Brown University librarian H. L. Koopman declared the Brown “portfolios” “one of the most valuable gifts of autographs . . . ever made to the Library,” he was identifying relics of the kind that I have just described as the essence of those books. He was also suggesting what the books’ assembly might, in the first instance, have owed to the obsession with autograph collecting that swept the United States during the nineteenth century, as Josh Lauer and Tamara Thornton outline.¹⁸ The avocation registered new convictions about the evidential value of penmanship, which was re-described in this era, in newly emphatic ways, as a revelatory medium to be valued both for its individual idiosyncrasy and expressiveness and for its difference from the anonymous impersonality of printed language. As the English essayist Thomas Byerly explained in his 1823 essay “On Characteristic Signatures,” when a man uses his pen, he acts “unconsciously . . . and there at all times nature flows unrestrained and free”; handwriting, Byerly proposed, was an infallible index to the essential truths of an individual’s character.¹⁹ For nineteenth-century commentators, the encounter with another’s penmanship brought one close to the writer—closer even, perhaps, than in a face-to-face encounter.

To accumulate tokens of that intimacy, nineteenth-century readers pestered their favorite authors both in person and through the mail. Nineteenth-century historical societies and libraries set out, well after the fact, to collect specimens of the handwriting of all fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, thereby showing, as Lauer explains, that “documentary ephemera” that had earlier been without intrinsic value had become “sacrosanct” in their guise as “national relics.”²⁰ Collectors took to rummaging through trunkfuls of family papers, knowing full well that the glamour they ascribed to the materials they found there generally owed little to their content, and much to their medium. The autograph album also came to prominence in the book market during this era, as a format of blank book tailor-made to exploit Americans’ newfound enthusiasm for the handwritten inscription and signature. Capitalizing on this enthusiasm in his own way, Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1844 published a musing article titled “A Book of Autographs,” in which he considered how “the original manuscript has always something which print itself must inevitably lose,” and in which he gestured toward the elusive meanings communicated, wordlessly, by the penman’s or penwoman’s “little imperfections of mechanical execution”: “Strange, that the mere identity of paper and ink should be so powerful.”²¹

The Browns offered an apparent testimony to that power when they elected to include within their scrapbook a note (undated) that they received from the celebrated American author Margaret Fuller—who was in Rome between 1847 and 1849, sending dispatches on the news of political revolution to the New York Tribune and, at the end of that period, working in the Fatebenefratelli hospital nursing the wounded defenders of the city. In nine polite lines, Fuller declines an invitation to call on the Browns. It appears as if, happy enough to have acquired a specimen of Fuller’s handwriting, the Browns did not worry unduly over how the writing documents their failure to secure the guest list that they had wanted for their entertaining.

One might draw an analogy with nineteenth-century America’s friendship albums: blank books, often lavishly bound and meant to be displayed on a parlour table, incrementally filled up over the years by an entire social network, who often sought through their contributions to honor the book’s owner. (That individual was generally, though not always, a young woman, positioned on the verge of leaving school or—because she was about to be married—on the verge of leaving home.) These volumes can be thought of as hybrids of the scrapbook, the autograph album, and the commonplace book, the latter being a venerable form long dedicated to documenting, through choice excerpts, a writer’s reading.²² The select company that was invited to contribute to the friendship album would often inscribe onto its pages, as the tokens by which they hoped to be remembered, evidence of their reading lives: they would choose for transcription familiar pieces of verse that could, in fact, have been read rather more easily in readily available print copies than in their transcriptions. (With remarkable frequency, the verses these contributors selected for transcription were stanzas of Lord Byron’s.) Originality was not expected or even necessarily desired in the album. The assumption was, instead, that “[b]y copying poems in their own hands, friends [could] turn generic sentiments into acts of relation and remembrance.”²³ So, in an album that belonged in the 1820s to a certain Eliza Burnham (a book now held in the Special Collections Library at the University of Wisconsin, Madison), one poem is left unattributed to an author but, in lieu of that information, is accompanied by the words “Transcribed by your Friend Harriet”; in the Ann Emlen Jones album held by the Library Company of Philadelphia, someone has written out Byron’s “Sunset in Greece” and then signed it, just at the spot in the page where one might expect an authorial signature, “C. E. R., Thursday morning, March 1st, 1827.” In a challenge to the conceptual norms scholars of literature bring to the books they study, authors and transcribers can seem within friendship albums to enjoy the exact same sort of privileges (even though, within the wider culture, authors’ growing celebrity status was one driver of nineteenth-century autograph-collecting).

As I noted earlier, these norms, which define the book as a unitary semantic unit by giving it the author and the title that jointly bind it together, are of limited use when it comes to thinking about the volumes in which nineteenth-century people housed their collections. Scrapbooks can often seem non-books (“portfolios”) both because they do not consistently have titles (I have noted some exceptions), and because they do not exactly have authors or, more precisely, do not have an author (too many authors instead: what if we counted, as author, each writer of a letter or a scrap of verse whose handiwork is preserved within a scrapbook’s pages?).²⁴ We get a sense of the pressures exerted by these bibliographic norms when we consider the current library record for the Browns’ scrapbook. Several of the letters and visiting cards pasted onto the volume’s pages have been addressed to “Mme” or “Mrs.” Brown (Caroline Matilda Brown). But the library catalogue record currently identifies the book solely with her husband Nicholas, who gets “creator” status in the metadata, and, in diminishing her agency, forestalls a robust engagement with this book’s composite, pluriform nature.

Ephemerological Pursuits

In the first dispatch she sent out as foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, datelined Liverpool, 23 August 1846, Margaret Fuller—not yet having arrived in Rome, and not yet having declined the Browns’ hospitality—wrote about how, at the Liverpool Mechanics’ Institute, she listened to a lecture about a new way of educating “the people.” The speaker reported on a group of women who had taken to “cutting out from books and pamphlets fragments on the great subjects of the day, which they send about in packages, or paste on walls and doors. He said that one such passage pasted on a door, he had seen read with eager interest by hundreds to whom such thoughts were probably quite new. . .”²⁵

Fuller’s generation had great faith in the tremendous communicative and pedagogical possibilities of print technology. In this passage, she applauds the feminine use of scissors as a means of augmenting this technology’s reach. Scissors will emancipate print from its state of lockdown in the book: as books are fragmented into smaller, more portable morsels, the “thoughts” they contain will, with greater ease, be transmitted around the country, or be converted into posters that will catch the eyes of passers-by in the city streets. (Here, once again, books are conceived of as containers.) If, in this passage, Fuller endorsed a scheme for distilling the content from books into other less ponderous and more mobile media formats such as letters and broadsides, later, in the dispatches to the Tribune that she sent off after her move to Rome, she would recount how non-book forms of ephemeral print were being harnessed to the cause of the republican revolution. “Every day produces these remarkable documents,” she wrote in a dispatch from April 1848, referring to the flurry of printed decrees, petitions, and declarations of faith that this revolutionary moment was engendering. In July of the following year, when the French army had invaded to quell the revolution, another of her letters to the Tribune remarked on how printed addresses accusing the French “liberticides” were being circulated “from hand to hand.”²⁶

The drive to collect that this essay has been tracking also took in minor media objects—the mass-produced broadsides and posters and handbills and ballots that were central in the nineteenth century to new forms of political communication, and the impetus for new modes of political literacy. In some respects, nineteenth-century Americans’ practices of book-making register a democratization of the Enlightenment science of “ephemerology”: a branch of knowledge, whose rise the media historian Gillian Russell has charted, which was dedicated to organizing, classifying and preserving cheap, ephemeral print in all its diversity and which was foundational in the development of historical bibliography. The eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth century figures whom Russell studies valued the minor, transient products of job-printing—the sorts of non-book print objects that were produced quickly and on the fly, and which were prone to get lost or be disposed of with the same rapidity—for the opportunities that they offered to document new kinds of temporality and historicity.²⁷

Manufactured under the pressure of current events, and intended to be transient and to fall rapidly into obsolescence, ephemeral print can for these very reasons seem to bring the experience of history close. Thus, for instance, the almost shocking sense of immediacy a scholar will now obtain from a particular page in another one of the books into which Margaret Fuller tried to put Italy—the fragile, battered notebook called her “Rome diary.” One finds pasted in there, amidst Fuller’s handwritten journal entries, a portion of a crudely printed flyer that originally communicated a decree that the executive of the city’s republican government issued on February 28th, 1849. Another page in the diary preserves a similar document, printed at the behest of the provisional republican government formed in Tuscany that year. It is accompanied by a handwritten annotation that reads “Compare the manifesto of the Poles April 1848.” The re-imagined political communities brought into being by the revolutions of 1848 turned out for the most part to be short-lived. With our foreknowledge of events, knowing that Guiseppe Mazzini’s republican movement was soon to collapse, knowing that the political bodies that relied on these media objects would turn out to be ephemeral as well, it is hard not to be moved on encountering these pages.²⁸

Within Rush Hawkins’s scrapbook, to which I now turn, similar pieces of pasted-in print also claim space on the page. Their inclusion reflects how the broader dissemination of ephemerological pursuits shifted somewhat the way people made books in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hawkins was not uninterested in preserving manuscript materials. Far from deviating wholly from the model of book-making that formed the Browns’ scrapbook, Hawkins also might be called an autograph collector. He claimed for his own scrapbook many manuscript materials that must earlier have been in the hands of the Browns, including letters that Mazzini sent to his countryman and fellow exile Antonio Gallenga in the 1840s, the rough draft in Nicholas Brown’s handwriting of the public statement he made in February 1849 about America’s support for the Roman revolution, and a series of confidential letters dating from the period of the revolution’s failure, sent to Brown to obtain his assistance in helping republican sympathizers escape from French-occupied Rome and (as with a letter to the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth) from other places where, after the uprisings of 1848, the forces of legitimism had seized back control. In the summing up of the volume’s contents Hawkins affixed to his scrapbook’s first page, these are the types of materials that he foregrounds. But, like many of his contemporaries, Hawkins was determined to use books to keep, organize, and lend legitimacy to non-book print. As a consequence, his book registers the significance that print that was never intended to have a shelf life possessed for popular politics on both sides of the Atlantic.²⁹

In the Universal Republican Alliance scrapbook, one finds, for instance, a specimen of the printed pledge forms that members of the Association dedicated to creating a universal republic around the world were supposed to fill in by hand as a token of their commitment. (Hawkins served for some years as secretary for the Association.) One finds printed invitations to, and printed notices of, meetings at which these American men will gather to hear lectures on republican principles and learn of the latest developments in Europe. There are tipped-in pamphlets written by Mazzini: La Reazione e la Democrazia; Lettera di Giuseppe Mazzini intorno gli affari di Roma; Dal Papa al concilio. The scrapbook’s serviceability here involves its capacity to remedy the cheap flimsiness of media objects of this type, which circulate more expeditiously than books, but which, lacking the binding that defines the codex form, fail to stand upright on people’s shelves and therefore tend all too often to get misplaced.³⁰

And with its collection of newspaper clippings, Hawkins’s scrapbook illustrates an aspect of nineteenth-century book-making wholly absent from the Browns’ book, but which has, since their day, become synonymous with scrapbooking generally. Ellen Gruber Garvey has traced how, in later nineteenth-century America, the ballooning circulation of daily newspapers (spurred by the Civil War, which made newspaper reading more central than ever to everyday family life) led more and more people to a practice of “writing with scissors.” Americans got into the habit of extracting from the daily paper snippets of the news or short poems or comic anecdotes and putting those into new configurations in their own books, while they discarded the rest of the paper for more debased uses, as kindling or waste paper in the privy.³¹ For these book-makers, as Anke te Heesen observes, “[p]asting, not writing, [was] the operative process for generating meaning.”³² Saving clippings in books was presented as character-building. The newspaperman E. W. Gurley, in his 1880 Scrap-books and How to Make Them, accordingly praised practitioners of scrapbooking for how they had learned to “read for a purpose” and how, while honing their powers of selection, they cured themselves of the “habit of gossipy reading.”³³ Offering his guidance to novices, Gurley also enumerates thirty different topics to which they might devote their book-making.

Hawkins mainly uses the “Universal Republican Alliance Scrapbook” to gather obituaries of people sympathetic to the cause of republican government--William James Linton, the English artist, Chartist in exile, and ally of Mazzini; the American historian William H. Prescott; Mazzini himself. There are exceptions: a clipping from an 1866 edition of the newspaper the London Star that reproduces a proclamation Mazzini had just printed up to be posted on the walls of Rome and which criticized the Italian people for their faithlessness to the cause of national unification; a clipping from the New York Tribune of Mazzini’s 1867 article on the Republican Alliance, which is paired with a draft in Mazzini’s hand of the piece. And, as though taking Gurley’s advice to the scrapbooker to heart, Hawkins filled up multiple scrapbooks on multiple topics over his lifetime. Others acquired by Brown University’s Hay Library include his “book of the dead” (more obituaries of friends), a scrapbook related to the Civil War, and a scrapbook labeled “Gutenberg.” (The Library also acquired, through him, some scrapbooks assembled by his wife, Annmary.) There are so many of these books, in fact, that one wonders whether Hawkins sometimes employed one of the professional clipping services that came into existence at the nineteenth century’s end. Gurley wrote in 1880 of how a scrapbook could be as self-expressive a document as “a private diary,” and it may be that for Hawkins, as for others, the attraction of writing with scissors was that it offered an especially elliptical way of writing autobiography. “We are all Scrap-books,” wrote Gurley (with eccentric capitalization), “and happy is he who has his Pages systematized, whose clippings have been culled from sources of truth and purity, and who has them firmly Pasted into his Book.”³⁴

Untimely Matter

Earlier, I observed that, unlike the printed books that we tend to make representative of books in general, scrapbooks, the Browns’ and Hawkins’s included, are not just instruments of communication but platforms for collection—and of things themselves. Scrapbooks enable those perusing them to see and to handle matter from another time: jagged fragments from the past that have somehow endured and which, through that survival, which can be jolting to discover, discompose the present. The thrilling sense of an immediate access to past lives that is sparked when one encounters and touches the letters from 1849 that the Browns preserved is inextricable from one’s discomfiting awareness that letters in general, written under the pressure of current events, are the genre of those who see only partially and who do not yet know how history will turn out. This is history in an unprocessed, still-uncertain state.

The letters and the print ephemera arrayed in a scrapbook can powerfully convey how it feels to live in history while it is still an uncertain, chancy thing—rather than afterward, while occupying a position of detachment. The printed, published book, equipped with consecutively numbered pages, a front cover and a back, and sometimes with a preface and an afterword, is in many ways an object lesson in how to model the linearity of time. The Anglo-American book type with which I began this essay—the travelogue in which the traveler moves from destination to destination, one day after the next, and which calls on readers to mirror that itinerary in their own progress—might exemplify the argument that books normally make about the shape of individual experience. Scrapbooks, however, are designedly nonlinear books. Sequence is often set at naught both by their makers and their users. They are to be dipped into, rather than read cover to cover, and it is rare that chronology has much to do with the order in which materials are physically arrayed on their pages. Many of the domestic manuscript volumes from the seventeenth century that are discussed by Margaret Ezell were, for instance, filled up by their makers from both directions simultaneously—so that now the reader who encounters them in libraries can turn a page and find she is looking at writing that is upside down, that belongs to the second volume that was begun from the “back” of the book.³⁵ Ellen Gruber Garvey has described how Civil War-era scrapbooks, though fashioned from newspapers, which move relentlessly forward day by day, invited “reader to leaf forward and back, and ‘turn backward time’ in its flight.”³⁶ The book type matters for reminding us of things and feelings that official histories and “real” books cannot quite manage to hold in place.

This means that, in their very form, scrapbooks can sponsor a resistance to ideas of historical inevitability. The historian Diana Moore has written of how, following the conclusion of the Italian war of independence and the installation in 1861 of Victor Emmanuel II as the monarch of a unified Italy, an international network of women supporters of Mazzini set about preserving an alternative memory of the Risorgimento and of the past that had led to this present. The public, official record diminished the historical contributions of the radical left, but in the family papers that these women gathered up and stored (in a repurposing, Moore proposes, of nineteenth-century women’s ordinary domestic duties), the memory of the republican future that had once been dreamt of endured.³⁷ For them, this work with paper was “political preparation . . . work done in private for the remaking of the public.”³⁸ Their resistance brings me, as I conclude, to one last category of ephemeral print that has been stored up in Rush Hawkins’s and the Browns’ scrapbooks: both contain a sampling of the subscription certificates, hand-signed by Mazzini, that were issued by the Universal Republican Alliance as part of a fund-raising campaign. In various denominations, of 50 cents, 1 dollar, and 10 dollars, these mass-produced papers are a kind of paper money—or perhaps they are more accurately described as promissory notes or checks drawn on the future. The printing on the left edge of each reads “Redeemable by the first Republic established in Europe after the Issue.” (On the right-hand edges are the handwritten annotations that mark each paper’s membership in a series of such certificates.) Much print ephemera is poignant because it has outlived the time in which it was to be used. Tickets or theatre programs or posters are made to be of single-purpose use, and when they survive, it is as the leftovers from the occasions to which they refer. These promissory notes, conversely, are poignant because they have not been used. Indeed, one might see them, left unredeemed, as messages emitted from a past whose hoped-for future—a universal republic—had (or, more precisely, has) not yet arrived. In the Browns’ book, as though to remind us that the scrapbooker’s time was still not that time, the envelope of near-transparent paper containing these bills has been annotated by hand “Do not open.” Stirred by these sorts of scrapbook materials, however, one cannot help but disobey—and so re-open the past’s closed book, read, and touch.