The Diary vs. Commonplace Books of Thomazine Pearse Leigh
By Kacie L. Wills, Allan Hancock College
The recent publication of Tamsine’s Diary: The life and times of a Devon Gentlewoman, 1808-1863 contains transcription from the diary of Thomazine Pearse Leigh (1796-1883) of Slade House, Salcombe Regis, in East Devon.[1] My initial interest in Thomazine, however, stemmed from a study of her commonplace books, which are part of the Keats House collection. These are housed in the London Metropolitan Archives, alongside commonplace books belonging to the Leigh sisters, Mary and Sarah, and to their cousin, Maria Pearse.[2] Dated from 1814-1817, they were donated to the Keats House Museum in the 1930s. The commonplace books represent the friendship (and flirtations) of the sisters with Keats’s closest friends: Benjamin Bailey, John Hamilton Reynolds, and James Rice. The 17 manuscripts, as Jillian Hess points out, are unique in having remained together, but have been little explored in scholarship, with the exception of an article by Clayton E. Hudnall in a 1970 volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal and, most notably, in Hess’s recent book, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums.[3] While much of Hudnall’s article focuses on the character of Benjamin Bailey as expressed within the books, Hess’s examination of the collection focuses on the women who made these books to “collect people primarily and poetry second.”[4]
Fig. 1: Back cover of the published transcription of Tamsine’s Diary, adapted and compiled by Christine and Rab Barnard for Sidmouth Museum (Sidmouth: The Sidmouth Museum by the Sid Vale Association, 2017, second edition with support of the Keats Foundation, 2023).
Both texts, the diary and the commonplace book, illustrate what Samantha Matthews describes in her recent work on album verse as a “shadow history of Romantic poetics.”[5] In this essay, I want to briefly consider the process of bringing a "shadow" into the light and the ethics of making private writing public, not only in the practice of commonplacing itself, but through the ways reading audiences (both public and scholarly) engage with these historical documents and the teaching and writing that emerges from this.[6]
A curious irony haunts the work of Thomazine Leigh: Tamsine’s Diary, a collection of personal writings intended to be private, is published and available to the public, while her commonplace books, originally meant to be circulated among friends and others in her social circle, remain protected from the public. (While anyone with a purpose for seeing these books could feasibly access them in the London Metropolitan Archives, knowledge of their existence and contents generally remains privy to an inner circle of scholars interested in both Romantic literary culture and Keats’s social networks.) Below, I share some examples from both the diary and the commonplace books to illustrate the strangeness of what has become by now a common practice of publishing personal writing for the consumption of both public and scholarly audiences. With Romantic women’s writing especially, we often overlook intended audience when engaging with source material that should have an audience of one or, as with the commonplace books, a small audience consisting of an inner circle.
Early entries in Tamsine’s Diary range from the mundane to the intensely private. She includes details like having her ears pierced (Jan 10 1808), having a tooth extracted (April 11 1812), or reflections on reading: “what should I do without books in our solitude. ‘Tis such a balm” (Feb 12 1812). More personal moments in which she shares her emotional state as a girl of sixteen are also included in the now-published diary, such as this entry from April 7, 1812: “(Tuesday) reached Bristol to the White Hart, after breakfast to Red Lodge, in coach half crying. The bell rung a death in mine ears and yet I was half glad all men in coach. Many days of sadness. Wished to speak to no one. Could not eat, always thinking of…” Here, Tamsine presumably thinks of the man she was intended to marry, Joe Holland, and of the illness which would take his life by September 3, 1812. She briefly enters into her diary on September 2, 1812: “(Wednesday) Heard Joe Holland was very ill, poor dear creature –never shall I like another so well.” Then, the next day, she reports that he had died, stating, “I was miserable to the greatest degree and unhappy—thought on his behaviour.” On September 5 she quickly writes that he has been buried, and on October 2, 1812, she notes that she is “Very unhappy” and “quite tired of school.” By November 4, 1812, however, she writes: “(Wednesday) laughed all morning, danced all evening.”
Entries from the early years in Tamsine’s Diary were written when Leigh was not much younger than the age of the first year college students I regularly teach. Reading them, I am struck by her brevity, and also by the rawness and the vulnerability expressed on the pages. The mundane details, the observations, and the extremes of emotion she presents across even short periods of time make clear how much this text was not meant for my eyes. While Tamsine’s Diary presents a fascinating picture of a woman’s life in Regency England, reading it simultaneously invokes feelings of alienation, discomfort, even voyeurism. Unlike her commonplace books, this diary’s audience, at least at the time she wrote these entries, was meant to be Tamsine and only Tamsine.
Fig. 2: Thomazine Leigh “Extracts from Various Authors,” Vol. 2, 1815 K/MS/01/047
Tamsine’s commonplace books, compiled shortly after the entries I’ve shared from her diary, however, were written with an audience in mind. The entries illustrate her personal interactions with both literary texts and the people she cares about.
Fig. 3: “The Blush” Thomazine Leigh “Extracts from Various Authors,” Vol. 2, 1815 K/MS/01/047
Fig. 4: Close up of “The Blush” Thomazine Leigh “Extracts from Various Authors,” Vol. 2, 1815 K/MS/01/047
Figures 3 and 4 show a page from volume 2 of Thomazine Leigh’s books, which exemplifies her personal interaction with a poem through the intertwined initials within hearts that accent the verses. “The Blush” was published in Elegant Extracts in 1803 and was widely printed in periodicals in both England and America. The poem is discussed by Jenna R. Bergmann in her article on blushing in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in which she claims that the blush is not only connected to purity and the male gaze, but “reveals intimate connections among mind, body, and emotion.”[7] This poem is especially interesting to examine within the context of Leigh’s book and the flirtations engaged in across the sisters’ commonplace books with Benjamin Bailey. Such flirtations took place through the transcription of published poems made personal through annotations, as well as personal poems written by Bailey, which emulated Keats and which were made public through their circulation in the commonplace books of the sisters.
These initials, however, don’t belong to Bailey or Reynolds. My guess is that they are Sarah and Thomazine Leigh’s initials intertwined. Sarah later writes in her “Dear Thomazin’s Book.” If this is the case, the inscription of constancy and affection between the sisters beneath the poem stands in contrast to the fleeting nature of the blush itself and the male gaze implied in the affection it inspires. This entry in her commonplace book, unlike the personal immediacy of her diary, invites the reader into connection through the poem, only to then use “doodles” and interactions with the poem in the commonplace book to alter our understanding of the sort of intimacy implied by the “blush.” The true, intimate connection exists in the bonds of sisterhood. The inscription, then, both mimics the flirtations seen across the volumes and reminds the viewer of the feminine relationships and practices of transcription that are at the core of the volumes’ meaning. The blush, generally signifying a lack of bodily control, is controlled and reinscribed by Thomazine (or perhaps Sarah) on the page of the commonplace book. This is just one example of the layered and complex relationships between the Leigh sisters, print culture, and gender expectations that are transcribed and mediated in the pages of these volumes.
Today, we are faced with questions of the ethics involved in making these personal books, circulated among a group of friends, accessible to a much wider audience. These texts, the diary of Tamsine and her commonplace books, represent two distinct genres of personal women’s writing from the nineteenth century. While both sorts of texts were imbued with personal significance, the commonplace books were meant to be more readily shared, at least among friends. Ironically, today it is the diary, however, that has been published and circulated. I think, within the right setting, such as a small class, when the context is rightly understood, reading these books can be an enjoyable and meaningful way to engage with the lives of the authors and with the Romantic period. Though these books were meant to be circulated among friends, they can invite readers into a friendly interaction with the texts copied within. In the case of someone’s diary, however, that invitation to read and participate in the content is not present.
The study of both Tamsine’s Diary and her commonplace books has helped me to realize the importance of awareness and acknowledgement of intended audience. We often ask our students to produce personal writing that is shared among a small group of teachers or peers—those essays are sometimes then published online to a far wider, public audience. While opening up the diaries and journals of young women writers to a public audience may feel unsavory, the commonplace books offer an alternative space to access some of this world. While we may not be the intended audience, we can enter this coterie of Leigh and her sisters and friends with respect and intention.
Notes
[1] Thomazine Pearse Leigh, Tamsine’s Diary: The life and times of a Devon Gentlewoman, 1808-186, adapted and compiled by Christine and Rab Barnard for Sidmouth Museum (Sidmouth: The Sidmouth Museum by the Sid Vale Association, 2017, second edition with support of the Keats Foundation, 2023). It is of note that this publication is based on extracts and transcription of Tamsine’s diary by her granddaughter, Thomazine Mary Browne (later Lady Lockyer). The original version of Tamsine’s diary, in fact, is no longer extant. This, of course, complicates the discussion of reading a personal diary in ways that I hope to explore in future scholarship.
[2] The London Metropolitan Archives, K/MS/01/046 – 61.
[3] Clayton E. Hudnall, “John Hamilton Reynolds, James Rise, and Benjamin Bailey in the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection,” Keats-Shelley Journal 19 (1970): 11-39.
[4] Jillian Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 221.
[5] Samantha Matthews, Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6.
[6] See Jane Danielewicz, “Personal Genres, Public Voices,” College Composition and Communication 59, no. 3 (Feb. 2008): 420-450, for a discussion of how personal writing can cultivate a public voice. See Kara Poe Alexander, “Rendering Private Writing Public in the DALN,” Composition Forum 36 (Summer 2017), for a discussion of the ethics of publishing student’s personal narratives. Both sources ultimately show links between personal and public writing and advocate exploiting this connection.
[7] Jenna R. Bergmann, “Romantic Anti-Dualism and the Blush in ‘Northanger Abbey’,” The Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 43-47.
About the Author
Dr. Kacie L. Wills is Assistant Professor of English at Allan Hancock College. She is the recipient of research grants from both the K-SAA and the Huntington Library and is co-editor of the book, Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Routledge 2020). She is the co-creator of the website sarahsophiabanks.com and is the co-editor of this special issue on Commonplacing and Commonplace Books. Her recent publications include essays in English Studies, Romanticism on the Net, The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts.