Print Culture, Life-Writing, and the Development of the Eighteenth-Century Pocket Memorandum Book

This thesis is the first comprehensive study of the pocket memorandum book. Pocket memorandum books proliferated in the second half of the eighteenth century, but their contemporary popularity has not been reflected in modern scholarship. These annual publications combined a range of printed material, such as interest tables, road distances and guides to country dances, with structured space for consumers to record their daily engagements and expenses. Drawing on over 200 extant copies and situating them alongside newspaper advertisements, periodicals, prints and more, I interrogate the production, use, and cultural status of the genre from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Throughout, I analyse the pocket memorandum book both as a print commodity and form of life-writing which fed into a range of social and cultural practices. This thesis offers significant new information on the mechanics of the memorandum book trade, such as the circulation figures, estimated survival rates, and the value of the books as a print commodity. It challenges the narrative that memorandum books emerged simply to circumvent the Stationers’ Company monopoly on publishing almanacs and provides a case study of provincial competition in eighteenth-century Newcastle. It also explores how the books were designed as a tool for record, time, and self-management, emerging as part of broader shifts in temporal thinking. In practice, consumers put the books to use in a myriad of ways. The way consumers drew on the material format of the page to structure life-writing is interrogated, as well as the role of memorandum book in underpinning other textual and social practices, such as gift-giving. Finally, this thesis turns to the most iconic image of the Bluestockings and its initial appearance as a print in a ladies’ memorandum book, to show the potential subversiveness of their gendered content, and how memorandum books have the power to challenge some of our most well-established histories of the eighteenth century.