In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explored creation by chronicling how Victor Frankenstein developed new life out of disparate, “remixed” body parts. Off the page, she created an intellectual life and career for herself — and helped to establish the new literary genre of science fiction. Other women who lived in England in the early 19th century were less independent than Shelley, but many expressed their creativity in other ways. NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection houses a number of unusual and intriguing women’s “scrapbooks” that offer another perspective. In the two we focus on here, the primary artists along with their family and friends assembled separate pieces to form a cohesive whole. Beautifully handmade and touchingly personal, these albums serve as invaluable examples of an earlier era of remix.
The Library’s scrapbooks were created by Anne Wagner and Julia Conyers, who had connections to the literary and social circles surrounding the Shelleys and Lord Byron. For women who didn’t have careers or lives that offered independence from their husbands and families, the opportunity to shape one’s own narrative was alluring. Just as many political and journalistic writings present the public world of men in the 18th and 19th centuries, women’s letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and artwork tell an equally vivid account: the “real” story of their everyday life.
What we think of as a scrapbook today, a bound book or album filled with mementos and photographs that document an individual’s or family’s history, first became popular during the 1800s. An extension of the commonplace book, the scrapbook evolved during the second half of the 19th century following the development of commercial printing and advent of photography. NYPL’s albums can be considered precursors to this scrapbooking tradition.
One of NYPL’s librarians has a special interest in handmade things. Jessica Pigza, assistant curator of the Rare Book Division, educates her colleagues and patrons about all kinds of crafts and the Library’s rich resources. She hosts a regular Handmade Crafternoon event and writes an NYPL blog called “Hand-Made.” Captivated by the Wagner and Conyers scrapbooks, she delved into them and shares her observations in the following pages.
Only three inches tall and five inches wide, Wagner’s Libri Amicorum, or Memorials of Friendship, contains her watercolors and collages as well as writing and artwork by friends and family members, including her niece Felicia Hemans. During the early 19th century, the popular Hemans was Lord Byron’s main rival for the bestselling poet of her generation. In 1816, when she was 14, she published her first poetry collection and 900 subscribers bought the book; one of them was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later, after her husband abandoned her, Hemans wrote to support her five sons.
In her aunt’s album, a 12-year-old Felicia Browne filled a page with intricate artwork and an affectionate inscription, while at a later date, she or someone else secured a bookplate for “Mrs. A. Hemans” on a page augmented by dried flowers and other decoration. The name Felicia Dorothea Browne appears on a few additional pages that feature charming collages.
Anne Wagner’s friendship book is a hybrid of sorts, part commonplace book and part scrapbook. Commonplace books, which date back to the mid-17th century, generally served as single volumes of miscellaneous quotes, poetry, and other writing collected by an individual. Scrapbooks, which dominated the Victorian era, gathered such printed material as periodical clippings, paper ephemera such as tickets, calling cards, and dance cards, and photos of friends into a large-format album designed to represent a person’s history or one aspect of their life. Scrapbooking regained popularity in the late-20th century and helped garner interest for its more modern cousin, mixed-media art.
In keeping with the book’s intended purpose, many of its inscriptions and artwork are the contributions of Anne Wagner’s friends and family, a number of which pay tribute to her and her friendship. The messages serve as a record of who visited Wagner and what words of wisdom or artistic talents they furnished. Looking at the communal effort, Jessica Pigza notes that it’s hard not to feel the intimacy of the creators and contributors as they interpreted friendships, discoveries, and emotions on each page.
Saving the hair of a loved one, a long-held tradition, is evident in the lives of the Romantic poets and the broader society. Mary Shelley’s mother, the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, died shortly after giving birth to the future author of Frankenstein; as a remembrance, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, preserved locks of his wife’s hair. Later, they were made into a necklace adorned with two lockets, each of which contained hair, with the initials “MWS” (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) and “PBS” (Percy Bysshe Shelley). Before Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra — her mother was Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont — died at age five, she wrote her father a letter from the Italian convent where she lived. The correspondence included locks of the child’s blond hair. Wagner’s album contains several samples of hair, adorned with ribbons, which have been secured to the pages.
During the 19th century, many women of the upper classes received education that focused on such skills as drawing, painting, sewing, playing musical instruments, and learning foreign languages. Jessica Pigza observes that domestic arts such as embroidery, quilting, and decorative crafts were considered important skills. “So many of the pages of the album show evidence of the importance of artistic training and skill for young women of a certain class,” she says. “Shells, feathers, branches, birds, and plants abound on these pages. The creator’s interest in the visual emblems of natural history acknowledges women’s increasing activities as naturalists, collecting, studying, and categorizing a variety of natural curiosities.”
The scrapbook owned and partially created by Julia Conyers is a de facto sketchbook, which contains pencil-and-ink-wash drawings, watercolors, and silhouettes from 1769 to 1830. Mounted to the leaves of the 9 1/2-by-12-inch bound book, the single sheets and smaller pieces of art range from copies of old masters to portraits to scenes from domestic life. Conyers became Lady Wrottesley when she married John Wrottesley in 1819. Wrottesley was a member of Parliament who was elevated to the House of Lords in 1838. They were then known as Baron and Baroness Wrottesley.
Like Wagner’s communal album, the Conyers sketchbook includes artwork by her and by others, most notably her friend Lady Caroline Lamb. Lamb, a prominent member of society and an author, pursued an affair with Lord Byron after reading his poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in early 1812. Although he ended the relationship in November of that year, the two continued to correspond and remained presences in one another’s lives. Her first novel, Glenarvon, published in 1816, is considered a roman à clef in which the title character is a stand-in for Byron. Although she was thought to be emotionally unstable, Lamb was a prolific writer and artist.
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