The Long and the Short of It: Commonplacing with Rossetti, Allingham and Porter

By Olivia Loksing Moy, City University of New York

Commonplace books were historically comprised of brief clippings and sayings, key phrases or quotes copied out into one common place for later reference. The assembled excerpts were mostly short and pithy. In antiquity, morsels of wisdom were collected on how to live a good life. In the Romantic era, readers copied stanzas from favorite Byron poems into friendship albums. In Victorian annuals, young girls collected riddles, jokes, and romantic couplets. American collections such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations anthologized short quotes, while creators of Civil War-era scrapbooks collected newspaper clippings.[1] In copybooks for training good penmanship, perfect reproduction was encouraged, with moral instruction cultivated through the repetitive osmosis of short maxims. Here, four- and five-word sentences abounded: “Every man has his faults.” “Reproach not the unhappy.” Brevity was key for the commonplace book and its many descendant forms into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: albums, annuals, scrapbooks, student copybooks, and quotation books.

Figure 1. “Every man has his faults. Reproach not the unhappy.” Nineteenth-century copybook. The Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library.

Figure 2. “Reproach not the unhappy.” Nineteenth-century copybook. The Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library.

Despite the inherent brevity of the entries themselves— conceived as morsels, nuggets, scraps, and trifles —the practice of commonplacing could be a long-term activity. One might contribute to a commonplace book over a span of many years or even decades, resulting in a sustained and grand project. A recipe book might contain as many as “Five Thousand Receipts,” passed along and added to by generations of women, then finally published.[2] In the case of Louisa Wildman’s commonplace book, kept at Newstead Abbey, the literary home of Byron, guests and visitors contributed literary content to the book over the course of forty years, as Mai-lin Cheng has explored.[3]         

Yet commonplacing could also tackle lengthy passages, and this essay discusses two instances of extended, long-form copying in commonplace books surrounding major literary figures of nineteenth-century England: Victorian poets Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and Jane Porter, the Romantic-era author of historical fiction, including The Scottish Chiefs (1809). These longer examples of commonplacing fulfilled the practical function of reproducing texts long before the advent of photocopy technologies. But they also point to the commonplace book’s role as a tool for emulating presence to make up for absence. These long-form examples challenge the model of commonplacing as clipping and curating short excerpts or “scraps,” emphasizing instead circulation and connection achieved through extensive manual copying.

The Allingham Commonplace Book, in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection

When D.G. Rossetti was nineteen years old, he came across an anonymous poem while reading in the library of the British Museum. That poem was Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, written in 1832, published and circulated briefly in 1833, then reprinted much later in 1868. Struck by how much he enjoyed it, and noting its likeness to Paracelsus, he harbored a hunch that it was written by none other than Robert Browning, a poet he admired but had never met. Since Pauline was no longer available in print, Rossetti copied the entirety of the poem— all 8,746 words of it —into his commonplace book. He wondered if Browning was the author, and boldly wrote a letter to the venerable poet, introducing himself as a fan and asking as much. Browning and Rossetti would exchange further correspondences in the coming decades and eventually meet in August of 1851.[4]

This letter, the initial correspondence between two great poets of the Victorian era, is now the stuff of bibliographic lore. As Mark Samuels Lasner has noted, the original autograph manuscript was sold in May 1913 at the Sotheby Browning sale, cataloged as “A LETTER OF EXCEPTIONAL LITERARY INTEREST, the first ever Written by Rossetti to Browning, when the former was only 19 years of age, and A REMARKABLE MEMORIAL OF TWO GREAT POETS.”[5] It now resides in the Huntington Library in California.

But what of Browning’s response? Little was known of Browning’s reply to his young, precocious fan. Rossetti’s copy of the reply was lost, stolen, or destroyed, and the original autograph manuscript never tracked down. It wasn’t until 1987 that the mystery behind Browning’s reply to the young Rossetti was revealed, in an article in Browning Institute Studies by Mark Samuels Lasner. The commonplace book of an important intermediary figure, William Allingham, solved the question, which Lasner clarified in this revelatory article.

Allingham, a minor Victorian poet of Irish descent, was a customs official and author of songs, poems, and stories ranked “halfway up the second league” of poets.[6] He kept both a diary (posthumously published in 1907) composed of his own writings, and a commonplace book, which collected the writings of other authors. Allingham’s commonplace book now resides in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library and is described by Lasner as “a small octavo notebook consisting of some ninety-five leaves of ruled laid paper bound in battered old calfskin.” It proves to be a highly essential association item and a point of connection between the two poets. In its opening pages, Allingham had copied out a letter, with the initials “R.B.” and addressed to “G.R., Esq” — the long-lost reply by Browning to Gabriel Rossetti! Finally, we can read, verbatim, Browning’s modest response from that lost letter: “You are quite right in your guess: I wrote the little poem you treat so goodnaturedly, in pursuance of a boyish plan…the few copies printed have long been withdrawn from the publishers - & I believe that at the present moment scarcely half a dozen of my friends are aware that such a literary sin is chargeable to me.” Following the copied letter is the poem Pauline, which takes up one third of the book (leaves 1 to 25), including the title page and the printer’s imprint. Like Rossetti before him, Allingham too had copied the entire 8,746-word poem into his own commonplace book, in a beautiful hand. [7] So, Browning’s long poem was—impressively—copied over twice, then circulated among young writers and appreciated by them even before Browning himself demurred and agreed to have it republished.[8]

Fig 3. Transcribed letter from “R B” marked “copy” on the top left, opposite the transcribed title page to Pauline. William Allingham commonplace book. Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.

Fig. 4. From Pauline. William Allingham commonplace book. Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.

The long-form copying of Pauline, twice over, shows us how commonplace books played an active part in intimate literary life and contemporary reception. Young readers were able to see and appreciate Pauline, and the poem’s circulation in this fashion even encouraged its eventual republication in 1868, making possible the poem’s wide recognition today.[9] With hard evidence, Allingham’s commonplacing confirms literary lore and furnishes us devotees of the archive with the long-sought text of the elder poet’s reply. While Rossetti’s commonplace book had a hand (pun intended) in saving Pauline from obscurity, Allingham’s commonplace book helped save the content of Browning’s reply letter to Rossetti from oblivion.

Henry Caulfield’s Commonplace Book, Copied into Jane Porter’s: Huntington Library

While both Rossetti and Allingham copied all 55 stanzas of Pauline, Jane Porter performed the impressive feat of copying out by hand an even lengthier, 50-page manuscript.  Jane and Maria Porter, or “the Porter Sisters,” the subject of Devoney Looser’s 2022 double biography, were famed novelists and pioneers of Romantic-era historical fiction. In their time, they were more illustrious than the Brontë sisters. Yet the Porter sisters have been relatively forgotten to literary history, in large part due to the overwhelming celebrity or Sir Walter Scott—a childhood friend of the Porters who not only went on to imitate their novels, but refused to acknowledge his indebtedness to their innovations in the historical fiction genre.

The Porter sisters never married, but they did have a series of romances with difficult and impossible male figures, often involving scandal. One such case was Henry Caulfield, a major romance in Jane Porter’s life whose talent was apparently derailed by adultery and debt.[10] On September 17, 1808, Henry Caulfield, who had been a lieutenant and captain in the First Regiment of Foot Guards, died at the age of 29. A talented thespian with the Pic-Nic club for gamblers, actors, and gourmands but also a known rake, he was the on-again, off-again love interest of the prolific Jane Porter. As Looser explains in Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, it was customary for female family members to help prepare a body for funeral, and Jane had been invited to join Caulfield’s sister in the funerary preparations. But she couldn’t bring herself to attend, and instead, after his death, copied Henry’s commonplace book in its entirety.[11]

Jane Porter lived from 1776 to 1850 and kept a 190-page commonplace book from 1812 to 1829. She copied over Henry’s commonplace book, lent to her by Henry’s sister, from beginning to end, in far more orderly cursive than the chaotic swirls found in her own commonplace book. “A fifty-page collection of epigrams, quotations, and short anecdotes,” Henry’s commonplace book was kept from 1804 to 1810, begun shortly after he and Jane traveled to Bath together and sparked spurious rumors of their engagement.[12] Jane, after meticulously copying the entire work by hand, and adding some commentary throughout marked with her initials, appended her own 31-line poem to the end: “Oh Henry! … / Much injured Friend! … / But oh! with thee my soul’s bright genius fled…” She also asked Thomas Campbell, a mutual friend, to borrow Henry’s copy of “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney” (1807), itself a kind of commonplace of quotes written by Jane.[13] Campbell’s copy Aphorisms contained Henry’s marginalia, and Jane copied all his markings over into her own copy of her book. Jane Porter’s commonplace book, which includes the content of Caulfield’s, now resides at the Huntington Library and was purchased by the Chicago collectors Hamill & Barker, Inc. in 1976.[14]

Figure 5. “Copied from a Common-place book of Henry Edwin Caulfield’s- and lent to me by his dear sister, Jessie Aspasia Campbell, in March, 1810, at Titness Cottage, Berks. Jane Porter.” In Caulfield, Henry Edwin, “Commonplace Book,” 1804-1810. Porter POR 1-2. Jane Porter Papers. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California. Photographed by Devoney Looser.

Figures 6-7. First and last page of Henry Caulfield’s commonplace book, copied over by Jane Porter. [“Here ends his MSS.”] Porter POR 1-2. Jane Porter Papers. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California. Photographed by Devoney Looser.

Here, long-form copying becomes a devotional practice of mourning. In Henry, Jane Porter lost a lover and a brother figure. Reproducing his marginalia and reproducing his entries, following the imprint of his written hand, offered her not just a way to mourn, but also a kind of physical intimacy with him through the written page.

Copying allows for closeness through a shared hand, temporarily breathing life into the writings of the departed. But it also helps to mark the passing of time, a component essential to grieving: finishing the book signals elapsed time and labor, a measured phase of mourning now complete.[15] Looser reports that leading up to these years, Jane had reached a slump in her writing. She had failed to meet the deadlines promised to her publishers Longman and Rees, who were awaiting drafts for which they had paid an advance. The family sorely needed the funds to support their aging mother. Yet by the end of 1809, Jane took up her pen again and was finishing up the last volume of The Scottish Chiefs.[16] Like a plug finally unstopped, her grief-through-copying offered the release needed to move on from the loss of Henry Caulfield. Looser writes, “Jane ended her transcription…with her own original poem to Henry. The poem’s speaker describes how she still believes she’s hearing his unforgettable voice, and how, with his death, her own soul’s bright genius had fled. But this was not at all the case. In 1808, after Henry passed away, Jane’s writerly genius became fully reactivated.”[17] 

With the cases of William Allingham and Jane Porter, we see commonplace books serving unexpected functions as sites for long-form reproduction, each a different iteration of scribal devotion and “book love.”[18] In the former example, commonplace entries copied from yet another commonplace book [Rossetti’s] served as a tool for unlocking a bibliographic mystery and uncovering an otherwise lost manuscript letter. In the latter, duplicating a commonplace book provided a mechanism for processing grief and overcoming writer’s block. Both offered connection through acts of devotion, recasting “rote copying” and collecting lengthy passages as an exhausting yet touching practice of discipline and love.

The author would like to thank Mark Samuels Lasner and Devoney Looser for their expertise and generosity..

Notes

[1] See Ellen Gruber Garvey’s full-length study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scrapbooks in America. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2012).

[2] C. Mackenzie, Mackenzie’s Five Thousand Receipts, in all the useful and domestic arts: constituting a complete practical library relative to agriculture, bees, bleaching (Philadelphia: J. Kay, 1831). See also Sam Mohite, “Commonplacing Kitchen-Physic: Anonymous Additions to An Early Modern Manuscript Book of “experimental receipts,” Keats-Shelley Journal+, Vol. 3, 2024.  

[3] Mai-lin Cheng, “Domestic Extracts,” Studies in Romanticism 60, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 467-485.

[4] See Arthur A. Adrian, “The Browning-Rossetti Friendship: Some Unpublished Letters,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 73, no. 5-part1 (1958): 538–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/460297.

[5] Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge. The Browning Collections…The Property of R.W. Barrett Browning (sale catalogue). London: Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, 1913, quoted in Lasner, 80.

[6] John Julius Norwich, Introduction to William Allingham: A Diary (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), quoted in Lasner, 81. Allingham published Poems in 1850, which was revised and republished as Day and Night Songs in 1854. He also composed Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, a verse novel.

[7] Lasner’s article explains that Allingham had access to the letter through Rossetti, not Robert Browning. Allingham was friends with both Browning and Rossetti, though separately. He developed a close friendship with Rossetti, who later illustrated an 1855 edition of his poems, while he maintained a more formal though long-lasting acquaintance with Browning. Read more in Lasner’s Browning Institute article, Lasner’s full bibliography, and Linde Lunny’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. For more on Rossetti’s relationship with Browning, see Rosalie Glynn Grylls, “Rossetti and Browning,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 33, no. 3 (1972): 232–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/26409957.

[8] Letter from Browning to Rossetti, dated Nov. 10, 1847, Florence. Quoted in Lasner, 87-88 and seen in Figure 3, copied over in Allingham’s hand.

[9] Lasner, 86-87.

[10] Caulfield became involved with another woman and died early from dissolution and poor health. At the time of his death, he was supposed to be in debtors’ prison but had snuck out, as he often did, and his friends and family had to return his body to prison deceive the coroner that he had died within the Rules of the Kings’ Bench. Looser, 243.

[11] Looser, 245.

[12] Ibid; Huntington Library, Jane Porter Papers: Manuscripts & Documents: Box 1: Caufeild -Porter commonplace Books, POR 1-2.

[13] See Looser, 206-207 for more on Jane Porter’s composition of Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney. Longman and Rees helped with the research for this book, granting Porter access to two folio volumes of Sidney’s notes, which she grouped into sayings under the headings of “Reason and Wisdom,” “Pride and Violence,” “Vanity and Flattery,” “Curiosity,” and “Persuasion,” among others.

[14] The book collectors Frances Hamill and Margery Barker formed Hammill & Barker, Inc. in 1976.

[15] See Chapter 6 of Jillian Hess’ book How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford University Press, 2022), which discusses “Commonplace Books of Mourning.”

[16] Looser, 279.

[17] Looser, 245.

[18] See Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Mai-lin Cheng, “Book Love and Reading Commonplaces” Keats-Shelley Journal+. Volume 1: (August 2024).

Bibliography

Allingham, William. Commonplace Book. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library. Newark, Delaware.

Allingham, William. Helen Allingham and Dollie Radford (eds.): William Allingham. A Diary. London: Macmillan, 1907.

Caulfield, Henry Edwin. “Commonplace Book,” 1804-1810. Porter POR 1-2. Jane Porter Papers. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California.

Lasner, Mark Samuels. “Browning’s First Letter to Rossetti: A Discovery,” Browning Institute Studies 15, Meet the Brownings, 1987: 79-90.

Looser, Devoney. Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Lunney, Linde. “William, Allingham.” Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2009 and online. https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.000122.v1

Porter, Jane. “Commonplace Book,” 1812-1829, Porter POR 1-2. Jane Porter Papers. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California.

Norwich, John Julius Norwich. Introduction to William Allingham: A Diary. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.

Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge. The Browning Collections…The Property of R.W. Barrett Browning (sale catalogue). London: Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, 1913.

About the Author

Olivia Loksing Moy is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York's Lehman College. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (2022) and the co-editor of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life (2023). With Marco Ramírez Rojas, she is translator and editor of Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats. She serves as Vice-President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and as Director of The CUNY Rare Book Scholars.