Crime Logs and Commonplace Books: Creative Engagements with Legal- and Social Justice-Themed Literature
By Melissa J. Ganz, Marquette University
Early in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, the convicted murderess Grace Marks describes her experiences working as a seamstress in the household of the warden of Kingston Penitentiary, where she is serving a life sentence. Grace explains that the “Governor’s wife,” who is sympathetic to Grace’s plight, keeps a scrapbook filled with accounts of famous criminals, which she displays alongside her daughters’ Keepsake Albums.[1] In addition to the Bible and religious tracts, the Governor’s wife and her friends pore over this volume. Grace peers at the book when the Governor’s wife is not looking and reads the newspaper clippings about her own case—clippings, she declares, that offer wildly conflicting and erroneous assessments of her guilt. The Governor’s wife “is a lady and they are all collecting things these days,” Grace wryly notes, “and so she must collect something, and she does this instead of pulling up ferns or pressing flowers, and in any case she likes to horrify her acquaintances” (26).
As Grace suggests, the scrapbook underscores the blend of entertainment, curiosity, and instruction that motivated middle-class reading in the nineteenth century. But the scrapbook is also a nod to Atwood’s narrative method, her creative reworking of a mid-nineteenth-century murder case. With epigraphs from historical and literary sources placed at the beginning of each chapter and references to sewing running through its pages—accentuated by images of quilt patterns, also appended to the beginning of each chapter—the novel is itself a brilliant patchwork of competing stories. I teach the novel regularly at Marquette University in the final unit of a class entitled Crime and Punishment in English Fiction. I pause over Grace’s description of the scrapbook and refer back to it later in our discussion of the text, as it helps students understand both Atwood’s narrative technique and the practice of commonplacing that I adapt for one of their assignments.
I ask students to keep commonplace books in all my classes. The journals supplement formal papers, short-writing assignments, and exams, and give students the opportunity to reflect on and respond to our texts in writing throughout the semester. Although David Allan has argued that novels inaugurated new reading practices that resulted in the decline of commonplacing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I have found commonplace books to be an extremely useful way for students to engage with literature—especially narrative fiction—from these periods.[2] As Jillian M. Hess and Deidre Lynch have shown, commonplace books and the adjacent genres of scrapbooks and literary albums have a rich history in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Where in the Renaissance, commonplacing involved the selection and transcription of passages from elite—primarily classical—texts, in the nineteenth century it came to involve the compilation of a wide range of materials, from original poetry and prose to hand-copied extracts to newspaper clippings to amateur watercolors to impressions of flowers to memorial cards.[3] This broader practice of compilation lives on today on both traditional and digital platforms and serves as an ideal assignment in literature courses.
In this essay, I sketch the goals of my commonplace book assignment and the guidelines and expectations I give students. I also offer an overview of and reflections on the responses the assignment has elicited, drawing primarily on work I have received in three upper-level courses—Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment, Victorian Literature and Social Reform, and Crime and Punishment in English Fiction. These classes count toward Marquette’s Core Curriculum and draw students from a range of majors with various levels of preparation. Commonplacing has been an invaluable pedagogical tool in these classes, prompting students at once to engage with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, to reflect on the role of literature in the pursuit of legal and social justice, and to develop their research and writing skills.
Goals and Nature of the Assignment
Commonplace books—or “crime logs,” as I call them in my legal-themed classes—help students think carefully and deeply about our readings. To foster ongoing writing and reflection, I ask students to include five entries in their journals, each of which should be about one to three paragraphs or the equivalent in length and should address a different text (or group of texts) from our course. Students turn in their journals toward the end of the semester so that they have time to synthesize and revisit topics and texts.
In keeping with the traditional goals of commonplacing, I invite students to use their journals to reflect on the meaning of particular passages, themes, or motifs; to respond to interpretations presented in class; and/or to engage with critical readings on our syllabus. But I also give students the option to include one or more “creative” responses, including creative rewrites of passages, imagined dialogues between characters and/or authors, mock Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, blog posts, playlists, and illustrations. In recent years, I have begun asking students to include one research-based entry that introduces a new source and explains its connection to one or more of our texts. Throughout the semester, I ask students to post short reading responses on our learning management system (“D2L”), and I allow students to use revised versions of up to two of these responses in their journals to keep the overall workload manageable and to give students the opportunity to revisit, develop, or otherwise modify their posts. At the end of the semester, I put together a Class Commonplace Book with one entry from each student so that everyone can read and learn from each other’s work.
I strive to set clear guidelines and expectations for the assignment. If students wish to adapt our texts for social media, for example, I ask for approximately ten tweets per entry or the equivalent number of Facebook or Instagram posts; playlists should likewise consist of about ten songs. I also ask students to include brief reflections on each of their creative responses in which they explain their goals and choices.
The research-based entries give students a chance to draw connections between texts and topics they encounter in our class and those in other classes. I added this requirement to help meet the goals of the “Discovery” tier of Marquette’s Core Curriculum, which seeks to foster inquiry about particular themes—in my case, “Basic Needs and Justice”—from different disciplinary perspectives. For this entry, I ask students to find a relevant and reliable source (either a primary or secondary source) and to explain how it sheds light on or relates to one or more of our texts. To prepare for this assignment, I build in opportunities to introduce students to library and web-based research; we also discuss some of the chapters in Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. I post links to relevant websites and databases on our D2L site, but I invite students to explore other resources and/or to draw from other courses they have taken and other texts they have read.
Overview of and Reflections on Student Work
The commonplace book assignment enables students to prepare some of their most thoughtful and creative work. The journals are rewarding for students to assemble and for me to read. In addition to offering insightful analyses of passages and motifs in our texts, students have written poems and character interviews and have reimagined the endings of novels—offering their own versions, for example, of the final paragraphs of Caleb Williams. Other students have written responses in the form of blog posts, legal briefs, and judicial opinions. I have also prompted students to experiment with point of view. When I teach novels such as Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, I invite students to rewrite passages using first-person narration so that students can better understand how the third-person narration distances readers from the novels’ transgressive characters and prevents us from sympathizing with them.
The creative responses have also taken other forms: one student put together an “Ask Mrs. Bennet” website featuring letters from mothers seeking advice about courtship and marriage, along with replies from Jane Austen’s self-appointed matchmaker, all written in a suitably ironic, Austenian mode. Another student created a survey entitled, “When would you lie?” inspired by Jeanie Deans’s ethical dilemma in Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian. Yet another student reflected on intersectionality and identity from the perspective of the biracial heroine of The Woman of Colour. In this way, students have grappled with challenging questions raised by our texts and have applied some of their insights about the works to their own lives.
Students also enjoy updating our texts for social media. Many students have prepared mock Facebook pages and Twitter feeds that adapt our texts for twenty-first century audiences. The Twitter feeds work especially well for characters whose manner of speech and mode of thinking fit the platform’s compressed medium of expression. One student, for example, composed a series of terse tweets to satirize Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarian values in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. Another student presented a frank but morally ambivalent account of Moll Flanders’s career as a bigamist and thief, a fitting update of Daniel Defoe’s novel (Figure 1). Yet another student created two Instagram accounts for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reflecting Jekyll’s two identities; Jekyll’s account remained fully accessible to the public, while Hyde’s remained private. Such adaptations bring the characters to life while highlighting the continuing relevance of the texts today.
Figure 1: Moll Flanders’s Twitter Feed by Luke Kaspari, Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment, Fall 2017.
Students have likewise created thoughtful playlists for characters in our texts. Popular options include Austen’s outspoken Elizabeth Bennet, the elder and younger Catherines from Wuthering Heights, and Braddon’s bigamous heroine Helen Talboys/Lady Audley (Figure 2). The most successful responses not only identify songs that the characters might listen to but go on to analyze some of the lyrics and explain how they speak to themes and passages in the texts. Students have also adapted or written their own songs: one student modified the lyrics of The Clash’s 1979 “Clampdown” to fit the plot and themes of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, while another student updated the lyrics of Ava Max’s “Sweet but Psycho” for Lady Audley’s Secret, using details and quotations from Braddon’s novel.
Figure 2: Lady Audley’s Playlist by Atiera Hoemke, Crime and Punishment in English Fiction, Fall 2022.
The commonplace books provide opportunities for artistically-inclined students, as well. One student created a short graphic novel based on Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” itself a parody of detective fiction (Figure 3). Another student sketched four characters from Middlemarch—Dorothea Brooke, Edward Casaubon, Rosamond Vincy, and Tertius Lydgate—and explained how the drawings reinforced aspects of the characters as depicted by George Eliot. Yet another student submitted a sketch in response to William Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” that depicts the poem’s “little girl” in a churchyard surrounded by four siblings standing near two graves. The student proceeded to analyze the sketch, explaining how it underscored the poem’s message concerning the power of memory, feeling, and the imagination to transcend the boundaries between the living and the dead. Students have also composed physical and digital collages that highlight key themes from our texts, creating their own versions of nineteenth-century scrapbooks.
Figure 3: “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” Reimagined by Kelli Arseneau, Crime and Punishment in English Fiction, Spring 2019
The research-based entry has also given rise to excellent work. Students have made interesting connections across a range of fields, introducing and discussing literary criticism, historical materials, and film adaptations, as well as readings from other classes. One student, for example, considered how Austen’s Pride and Prejudice anticipates recent accounts of the nature of unconscious bias and the dangers of snap judgments. Other students have brought research on dissociative identity disorder to bear on Jekyll and Hyde and have discussed contemporary accounts of trauma and incarceration in connection with Alias Grace.
The Class Commonplace Book (or Class Crime Log), for its part, gives students a chance to read some of the most interesting work by their peers. The journal fosters a sense of belonging, reminding students of the collaborative enterprise in which they have been engaged throughout the semester. In courses that have final exams, it also serves as a study guide. In the past, I have distributed hard copies and electronic versions (pdfs), but the Class Commonplace Book could also be public facing like the commonplace books on the K-SJ+ site.
Overall, the commonplace book has proved to be a highly versatile and valuable assignment. From first-year seminars and introductory-literature classes to upper-level courses and graduate seminars, the reflective and synthetic nature of commonplacing makes it an extremely useful pedagogical tool. In my legal- and social justice-themed classes, it has enabled students to combine personal reactions with broader ethical and political concerns while highlighting the continuing relevance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature today. Commonplace books ultimately bridge the past and the present. Much as Atwood does in Alias Grace, the journals enable students creatively to engage with “older” texts while updating and innovating an ancient tradition.
Notes
I am grateful to the students in my classes for their creative and thoughtful responses to the commonplace book assignment. I especially want to thank Kelli Arseneau, Atiera Hoemke, Sabrina Huston, and Luke Kaspari for generously sharing their work.
[1] Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 21. Further references will be noted in the text.
[2] See David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 255–67.
[3] Jillian M. Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20022); Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 137–44. On the origins and history of commonplacing, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
About the Author
Melissa J. Ganz is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. She works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between literature, law, and ethics. She is the author of Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press, 2019) and editor of British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her essays have appeared in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Review of English Studies, and ELH. She also has an active interest in pedagogy and has contributed several chapters to pedagogy volumes, including the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching Austen’s “Persuasion.”