Abstract
This chapter takes as its point of departure the complementary accounts by two of the pioneers in the study of marginalia, Heather Jackson and William Sherman, of the ways in which the age-old practice of writing in books has been disparaged and condemned. It aims to explore the particularities of that discourse of condemnation in Australia in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, using the resources of Trove, a comprehensive database of Australian metropolitan and provincial newspapers, to illustrate its tendency to articulate conflicts and anxieties around class, gender and national politics in the guise of moral disapproval and aesthetic distaste. However, taking its cue from personal reflections by Joan Didion, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and others, the chapter also seeks to show the enduring ambivalence of this condemnation in its own terms, an ambivalence that permitted various forms of annotation to retain their popularity as pedagogical instruments, especially for the study of literature, until well into the second half of last century. In tandem with that, it illustrates the continuing power of annotations to provide unpredictable insights into the education process, and occasionally to function for individuals as a means of intellectual self-recovery and ethical self-scrutiny.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Traces and Spaces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 2.
Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Exercise? Guillaume Budé and His Books,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91, no. 2 (1997): 139–57.
- 3.
Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). The special status accorded to marginalia in early modern studies has been further underlined by the recent collection of essays, Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. Katherine Acheson (New York and London: Routledge, 2019).
- 4.
H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). See also her Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
- 5.
See, for example, James Bridle, “Ebooks: A More Civilized Way of Scribbling in the Margins?” Guardian, 25 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/25/ebooks-bookmarks-annotation-scribbling-margins.
- 6.
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 182.
- 7.
Jackson, Marginalia, passim, but see especially ch. 3.
- 8.
See essays by Bodo Plachter (Kafka), Davide Giuriato (Benjamin), Axel Gellhaus (Celan), Geert Lernout (Joyce), and Dirk Van Hulle (Beckett), in Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo, eds., Reading Notes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
- 9.
Kevin Jackson, Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities (London: Picador, 1999), 161–80. See also John Roache on the marginalia of David Foster Wallace.
- 10.
See, for example, Stephen Colclough, “‘RR, a Remarkable Thing or Action’: John Dawson as a Reader and Annotator,” in The History of Reading: A Reader, ed. Shafqat Towheed, Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey (London: Routledge, 2011), 353–60.
- 11.
Patrick Buckridge, “Generations of Books: A Tasmanian Family Library, 1816–1994,” Library Quarterly, 76, no. 4 (2006): 388–402; Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 12.
Patrick Buckridge, “Books as Gifts: The Meaning and Function of a Personal Library,” Australian Literary Studies, 27, nos. 3–4 (2012): 59–73.
- 13.
Patrick Buckridge, “The Harp in the South: Reading Ireland in Australia,” in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000, ed. Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 442.
- 14.
Wim Van Mierlo, “Influence, Confluence, and Writing in the Margins: Reading Notes and Literary History,” paper presented at the Material Cultures and Creation of Knowledge conference, University of Edinburgh, 21–24 July 2005, www.ibrarian.net/navon/paper/_Institute_of_English_Studies.pdf?paperid=5507925.
- 15.
Jackson, Marginalia, 73.
- 16.
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 28 September 1897, 8.
- 17.
Strictly speaking, of course, it is the books rather than the marginalia that are “owned” or “not owned,” but I hope the reader will excuse the imprecision in return for simplicity and neutrality.
- 18.
“Books,” The Capricornian (Rockhampton, Qld.), 4 August 1894, 39. (The article is sourced to the London Evening Standard.)
- 19.
Susan Rusinko, Joe Orton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 3.
- 20.
Simon Shepherd, Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1989), 13.
- 21.
“Literary Gossip,” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1897, 4.
- 22.
“Why Electors Should Vote ‘Yes,’” Barrier Miner, 27 October 1916, 6.
- 23.
“Communistic Filth,” Barrier Miner, 28 June 1933, 1.
- 24.
Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39–42.
- 25.
[James Paton], “Vandalism of the Bigot: How Books Are Spoiled in Hobart Public Library,” The Clipper, 17 January 1903, 6. Charles Christian Hennell (1809–1850) was regarded as representing a “revived English deism” and to have been an influence on George Eliot; William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), a mathematician and philosopher, and John William Draper (1811–82), scientist and philosopher, both advocated more advanced forms of secular rationalism than Hennell. “Charles Christian Hennell,” Wikipedia, last edited 18 August 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Christian_Hennell; “William Kingdon Clifford,” Wikipedia, last edited 11 September 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kingdon_Clifford; “John William Draper,” Wikipedia, last edited 27 July 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Draper.
- 26.
“Sydney Mechanics School of Arts: The Annual Meeting,” Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February 1886, 6.
- 27.
“Defaced Books,” Northern Argus, 25 March 1892, 2.
- 28.
C. R. Collins, “Marginalia,” West Australian [Perth], 9 November 1929, 5.
- 29.
S. M., Killara, “Crime of Book Defacement,” Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1934, 2.
- 30.
“The Margin-Critic: Annoyance to Other Readers,” Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 1937, 2.
- 31.
William Sherman, Used Books, 155.
- 32.
“Literary Gossip,” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1897, 4.
- 33.
“Literary Vandals,” The Age, 28 February 1931, 6.
- 34.
A. J. H., “The Vandal,” West Australian (Perth), 26 December 1936, 4.
- 35.
Benjamin Law, “My Bad: Dealing with a Sorry Situation,” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2016, http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/adult-education/my-bad-dealing-with-a-sorry-situation-20160823-gqz63g.html; Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1968), 139.
- 36.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 155.
- 37.
Spacks, On Rereading, 173.
- 38.
Mortimer Adler, “How to Mark a Book,” The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 July 1941, http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~pinsky/mark_a_book.htm.
- 39.
See, for example, “Note-Taking and Note-Making,” Counselling and Careers Development, University of Witwatersrand, accessed 7 November 2016, https://www.wits.ac.za/ccdu/academic-skills/note-taking-and-note-making/.
- 40.
W. M. Smyth, ed., A Book of Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1959), 171.
- 41.
The Royal Readers: No. 5 Royal School Series (Queensland edition) ([1898]), 419.
- 42.
Jackson, Marginalia, 21–25.
- 43.
Meg Meiman, “The Anonymous Reader: Marginalia in Library Books,” paper presented at the Material Cultures and Creation of Knowledge conference, University of Edinburgh, 23 July 2005. https://megmeiman.wordpress.com/.
- 44.
Frederick Thomas Attenborough, “‘I don’t f***king care!’: Marginalia and the (Textual) Negotiation of an Academic Identity by University Students,” Discourse & Communication, 5, no. 2 (2011): 99–121.
- 45.
Attenborough, “I don’t f***king care!,” 118.
- 46.
The base text here is a book chapter: S. Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, edited by M. Jacobus, E. F. Keller, and S. Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 1990), 83–112.
- 47.
The sex of the annotators is, of course, speculative, but given the experiential content of the first comment and the subject of the chapter, it seems defensible to read “with the grain” here, seeing a battle of the sexes in microcosm. The chronological sequence of the second and third annotators is reversible.
Works Cited
Adler, Mortimer. 1941. How to Mark a Book. Saturday Review of Literature, 6 July.
Attenborough, Frederick Thomas. 2011. ‘I don’t f***king care!’: Marginalia and the (Textual) Negotiation of an Academic Identity by University Students. Discourse & Communication 5: 99–121.
Bordo, S. 1990. Reading the Slender Body. In Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. M. Jacobus, E.F. Keller, and S. Shuttleworth, 83–112. London: Routledge.
Buckridge, Patrick. 2006. Generations of Books: A Tasmanian Family Library, 1816–1994. Library Quarterly 76: 388–402.
———. 2011. The Harp in the South: Reading Ireland in Australia. In The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume 5: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000, ed. Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh, 440–461. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2012. Books as Gifts: The Meaning and Function of a Personal Library. Australian Literary Studies 27: 59–73.
Burgmann, Verity. 1995. Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Colclough, Stephen. 2011. ‘RR, a Remarkable Thing or Action’: John Dawson as a Reader and Annotator. In The History of Reading: A Reader, ed. Shafqat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey, 353–360. London: Routledge.
Didion, Joan. 1968. On Keeping a Notebook. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 131–141. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Grafton, Anthony. 1997. Is the History of Reading a Marginal Exercise? Guillaume Budé and His Books. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91: 139–157.
Jackson, Kevin. 1999. Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities. London: Picador.
Jackson, Heather J. 2001. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. 2005. Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Meiman, Meg. 2005. The Anonymous Reader: Marginalia in Library Books. Paper presented at the Material Cultures and Creation of Knowledge Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 23. https://megmeiman.wordpress.com/.
Orgel, Stephen. 2015. The Reader in the Book: A Study of Traces and Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press.
Price, Leah. 2012. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Roache, John. 2017. ‘The Realer, More Enduring and Sentimental Part of Him’: David Foster Wallace’s Personal Library and Marginalia. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 5: 1–35.
Rusinko, Susan. 1995. Joe Orton. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Shepherd, Simon. 1989. Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton. London: Gay Men’s Press.
Sherman, William H. 2008. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Smyth, W.M., ed. 1959. A Book of Poetry. London: Edward Arnold.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2011. On Rereading. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
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Van Mierlo, Wim. 2005. Influence, Confluence, and Writing in the Margins: Reading Notes and Literary History. Paper presented at the Material Cultures and Creation of Knowledge conference, University of Edinburgh, July 21–24. https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/289.
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Buckridge, P. (2021). The Ethics of Annotation: Reading, Studying, and Defacing Books in Australia. In: Spedding, P., Tankard, P. (eds) Marginal Notes. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56312-7_10
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