Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

The Evening Under Lamplight…
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searched for images to incorporate into my own composition, I began to see the work
from a wholly fresh perspective. For one thing, the beginning of the novel made a new
kind of sense: I realized that James Ramsay, “cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue
of the Army and Navy Stores” (TTL 3), was probably collecting pictures to glue into
a scrapbook, and his actions—endowing certain images “with heavenly bliss,” “fring[ing]
them with joy” (TTL 3)—are a “private code,” a “secret language” (TTL 4) for what Woolf
is doing in the novel: creating a family scrap/photo album (see Figure1).
Let me contextualize this discussion with a brief history of scrapbooking. Th e OED lists
the earliest print appearance of the word “scrap-book” as 1825: “Scrap Book, or a selection of
…anecdotes,” implicitly placing the origin of scrapbooks in the seventeenth-century popularity
of commonplace books in which “passages important for reference were collected, usually
under general headings” (OED). While commonplace books generally gathered bits of
text, the eighteenth century saw the appearance of “extra illustrated” books, such as William
Granger’s 1769 history of England which was published with added pages of illustrations,
including blank pages where readers could paste in their own pictures (Slatten). In his recent
history of commonplace books, Earle Havens notes that by the beginning of Victoria’s reign
the habit of collecting printed matter such as “pasted-down scraps from newspapers and
literary magazines, as well as carefully cut out and hand-coloured images” (90) had become
widespread, fostered by the sale of “large blank folio albums…with thick, stiff pages to hold
print, sketches, photographs, and so forth” (90-93). And in their History of Printed Scraps,
Allistair Allen and Joan Hoverstadt date the fi rst appearance of color scraps—“small paper
images lithographically printed and often embossed”—and the albums displaying them to
the invention of chromolithography in 1837 (8-9).
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a wide range of uses for albums had emerged.
Friendship albums, kept mainly by women, contained autographs, favorite poems, quotations,
calling cards, drawings, and even hair weavings. Other albums of collectibles included
advertising trade cards and carte-de-visite photographs (postcards). Th e John W.
Hartman Center for the Study of Marketing and Advertising History at Duke University
contends that “Creating scrapbooks became a popular pastime, especially for women and
children,” noting that “Scrapbooks were used as a way of teaching children to organize
and classify information and to develop an artistic sense.” Allen and Hoverstadt similarly
chronicle the many uses of scraps in entertaining and educating Victorian children such
as using the scraps to play various card games, to tell nursery rhymes and fables, and to
teach children their alphabet (12). However, scrapbooking was not entirely coded female.
Th omas Jeff erson for instance, kept newspaper clippings in blank albums. And Mark
Twain was such an enthusiast of scrapbooking that in 1872 he patented the designs for
and made a good deal of money from a series of scrapbooks sold by Brentano’s and Montgomery
Ward’s (Slatten). 2 Of course the evolution of scrapbooks into photo albums really
began in 1888 when the Kodak camera and rolled fi lm were fi rst marketed (Hartman
Center; also mentioned by Humm, Snapshots 4).
Virginia Stephen’s acquaintance with every aspect of the emerging world of Victorian
and modernist photography is well known. Th at acquaintance included the realm of
scrapbooks as well. Allen and Hoverstadt call the years 1880-1900—a period bracketing
Virginia’s childhood—the “Golden Era of the printed relief” (25). Gill Lowe points out
how important Tit-Bits (which grew out of editor George Newnes’s interest in scraps) was as