The Commonplace Book of Edmund Pear (c. 1829-1834)
By Roseanna Kettle, University of York
Commonplacing was not a phenomenon I set out to explore during my doctoral study – but through pure circumstance it has become a key research interest of mine. In 2021, I discovered the commonplace book of Edmund Pear, a young man writing in the Lincolnshire fens in the early 1830s, in my family home, where it had long been mistaken for a wartime diary. On closer inspection of its tell-tale crosswriting, however, and its selection of poetry, it became clear that this was a Romantic-era text. The fact of Pear’s authorship may be gleaned by the inclusion of a note added to the text (see fig. 1) by a later contributor. This note, though difficult to attribute, provides plenty of verifiable information: Edmund’s dates of birth and death, and the fact that he perished during a flash flood in the low-lying Lincolnshire fenland. His deafness and “total” paralysis are much harder to verify, but the accuracy of the other data speaks to its likely veracity.
Fig. 1: The note on the inlay of Pear’s document. Text reads as follows: “This book was written by Edmund Pear, previous to his 18th year, - He was born at Tydd St Mary Lincolnshire May 14 - 1814 drowned Jan 28th 1834 - Entirely lost his hearing after Scarlet fever, and was completely paralyzed from the same illness this occured when he was 5 years old –”
Marriage records from Pear’s native village of Tydd St. Mary reveal that his father was a sluice keeper, married by license in 1810 (despite the cheaper option of marriage by banns) to Mary Betton, a woman from the same parish. The Pears had a comfortable disposable income, and this is reflected in the breadth of Edmund’s reading material. His book includes over 170 entries of poetry and prose, broad in terms of genre, and selected from a variety of sources, and these sources throw up a number of potential purposes behind Pear’s writing.
Given its uniformity of style and general neatness, it is possible that Edmund’s writing was a self-organizing practice, intended to either improve his handwriting or as a repertoire for interesting quotations to be used in a social capacity. This use of the commonplace was certainly not a novel one, and indeed may have been perceived as a worthy, improving pastime for one whose physical mobility was limited.[1] This may explain his inclusion of short stories, jokes, riddles, and puzzles. The book’s lack of thematic structure, however, detracts from the idea of it having a mostly organizational purpose.
Most of Pear’s selections are derived from one periodical, namely The Saturday Magazine (1832-1844). Many quotations from this publication are re-arranged on a page, taken from various issues of the Magazine to which Pear or a family member may have had a subscription. The Magazine’s layout often informs Pear’s physical arrangement of the text on the page, with the same level of authorial attribution included, the same emphasis, and dividers used to section off separate quotations (see fig. 2). This suggests that Pear’s commonplacing forms a response to his consumption of print material, allowing him to craft a “magazine” of his own, and permitting him some level of engagement with broader political debates, as he does frequently through his inclusion of anti-slavery poetry.[2] Among Pear’s favorite poets is James Montgomery, a journalist and philanthropist operating in Sheffield, and a keen voice in favor of abolition. Though popular in his own time, outselling many heavyweights of the Romantic period, Montgomery’s fame has not lasted to the present day. Pear’s book, however, is testament to his extremely broad reach in this time.
Fig. 2: Three excerpts on one page, taken from two different issues of the Saturday Magazine (February and June 1833). Pear preserves the asterisk (though not the footnote) to the poem “Epitaph.” Emphasis on the words “slumber” and “die” is replicated through underlining, rather than the original italicization. Each is also credited exactly as in the source material (e.g. “Sir E. Turner” for the second excerpt is exactly as in the Magazine).
Besides these more practical uses, however, it is important not to overlook the deeply emotional resonances that the specific pieces selected by Pear present. Significantly, a few poems here speak profoundly to themes of disability and chronic illness—amongst them, Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, and a poem about the chronically ill public figure, Princess Amelia—intimating that Pear’s curation was not merely a replication of his source material, instead allowing him to comment on his own quotidian experiences. One unusual feature of the document is Pear’s use of crosswriting, normally employed when writing letters to make economic use of paper space, though apparently unnecessary in a manuscript book that is far from being filled (see fig 3). This seems counterproductive for memorization of his pieces, obscuring rather than clarifying notable quotations. While not used uniformly across the document, several long poems are contracted by Pear in this manner. This, paired with the occasional removal of pages, may signify that Pear was cutting out and sending these extracts to friends or relations. That many of his sources are also literary annuals and gift-books (such as 1831’s Forget Me Not, and the Literary Souvenir), frequently used as Christmas or birthday gifts comprising beautifully decorated literary collections, may add to the theory that Pear’s literary curation testifies to the importance of his close relationships.[3]
Fig. 3: A poem in Pear's book - “A Noontide Retreat,” attributed to Mrs. C. G. Goodwin, exemplifying his idiosyncratic use of crosswriting.
Notably, and, perhaps ironically, there is no Shelley, nor any Keats, present in Pear’s selection. What is startling about his favored authors, though, is the presence of many writers who, their popularity in the period itself notwithstanding, have not remained within the Romantic canon into the present day. Particularly notable is Pear’s engagement with non-canonical writers who remained immensely popular within the commercial literary worlds of the gift book, the literary annual, and the periodical magazine, many of whom remain unidentified, and may not even have been professional or self-identified writers in the sense with which Romantic scholars are generally familiar.
Notes
[1] See Lucia Dacome, “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 4 (October 2004): 603-604.
[2] See David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 227.
[3] Forget Me Not; a Christmas, New Year’s, and Birth-Day Present, ed. Frederic Shoberl (London: R. Ackermann, 1831); The Literary Souvenir, ed. Alaric Alexander Watts (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1831).
A version of this research material focusing on Pear’s disability was presented by Kettle at the K-SAA-sponsored MLA panel on “Disabling Environments” in January 2024 in Philadelphia.
About the Author
Roseanna Kettle is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CECS). Her research interests include poetry associated with regional Britain, the literature of industrialism, laboring-class literature, and cultures of reading in the Romantic period. She has a forthcoming book chapter on the poetry of laboring women in Yorkshire, projected for publication with Boydell & Brewer in Summer, 2025.