The Keepsake for 1829

432 Pages·2006·11.553 MB·English

by  Frederic Mansel Reynolds, Paula R. Feldman

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The Keepsake for 1829
With an introduction by Paula R. Feldman
Literary annuals played a major role in the popular
culture of nineteenth-century Britain and America, and
The Keepsake was the most distinguished, successful, and
enduring of them all. The 1829 edition was stellar, with
contributions by William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Letitia Landon,
Felicia Hemans, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The whole of The Keepsake for 1829 is reproduced
here in facsimile, so readers can experience it as it was
fi rst published, with the text adorned by the original
illustrations. An in-depth introduction by Paula R.
Feldman contextualizes the volume for modern readers.
Paula R. Feldman holds the C. Wallace Martin Chair
in English at the University of South Carolina.
Her many books and articles focus on
Romantic-era literature and Women’s Studies.
broadview encore editions
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THE KEEPSAKE
FOR
1829
edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds
and
with an introduction by Paula R. Feldman
broadview encore editions
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w Introduction © 2006 Paula R. Feldman
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R All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval
system, without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence
from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900,
Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
The keepsake for 1829 / edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds; and with an
introduction by Paula R. Feldman.
(Broadview encore editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-585-9
1. English literature—19th century. 2. Art—Great Britain—19th century. 3. Gift
books—Great Britain. I. Reynolds, Frederic Mansel, d. 1850 II. Feldman, Paula R.
III. Series.
PR1143.K44 2006 820.8'007 C2006-901671-2
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PRINTED IN CANADA
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Introduction 7
Bibliography 27
The Keepsake for 1829 33
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An annual is an off ering at the shrine of friendship—a
token of hallowed reminiscences ...
Rev. S.D. Burchard1
Among all of the British literary annuals, The Keepsake was the
most distinguished, successful, and longest running, appearing
each autumn for twenty-nine years, from 1827 to 1856.2 As such,
it played a major but still largely undocumented role in the cul-
ture of nineteenth-century Britain. According to its fi rst editor,
William Harrison Ainsworth, its “principal object ... [was] to render
the union of literary merit with all the beauty and elegance of
art as complete as possible.”3 Indeed, annuals such as The Keepsake
circulated literature to mainly middle-class readers, and, on an un-
precedented scale, allowed ordinary people to own high quality
reproductions of signifi cant works of art.4 They carried engravings
of paintings by the most highly respected artists,5 and within their
pages the short story blossomed as a genre. Many of these books
were best sellers.6 Like other literary annuals, The Keepsake is a
1 “Annuals,” Laurel Wreath (Hartford: S. Andrus & Son, 1845) 9.
2 The Keepsake for 1828 was published in late 1827 and so forth, so the last appearance of
this annual, The Keepsake for 1857, likewise, appeared in 1856. Rival publishers exploited
The Keepsake name and reputation to gain readership for such works as The Juvenile
Keepsake (1829-30, 35), the Biographical Keepsake (1830), Le Keepsake Français (1830-1840),
The Hibernian Keepsake (1832), The Midsummer Keepsake (1834), The Christian Keepsake,
and Missionary Annual (1825-1838), The Biblical Keepsake (1835), The Historical Keepsake
(1836), Fisher’s Oriental Keepsake (1837-39), and The Protestant Christian Keepsake (1840),
among others. Some volumes capitalized on The Keepsake’s distinctive appearance as well
as its title. For example, in 1854, T. Nelson and Sons, of London and Edinburgh, published
an anthology of prose and poetry entitled The Keepsake: A Gift for All Seasons, bound in
red cloth, to resemble its namesake, with elaborate gilt embossing on the front cover and
spine and elaborate blind stamping on the back cover.
3 “Preface” to The Keepsake for 1828, p. vi.
4 Original art was, for the most part, inaccessible to the general populace; it hung in the
private homes of the wealthy.
5 Artists included Turner, Martin, Lawrence, Opie, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Land-
seer.
6 According to Altick, in 1828 approximately 100,000 copies of various British annuals
sold to the public at a retail cost of over seventy thousand pounds, an enormous sum in
those days (English Common Reader, p. 362). At the height of the craze, Alaric A. Watts’
Literary Souvenir sold ten thousand copies in 1830 alone.
introduction 7
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w remarkable index to the taste and popular culture of the 1820s, ’30s,
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evi and ’40s. It documents, too, the increasing economic importance of
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female readers and the infl uence they came to exert on the subject
matter and style of literature.
Crafted as beautifully as it was possible to make books in their
day, annuals came bound in silk, pictorial paper boards or tooled
leather, and sported leaves edged in gilt. They typically contained
poetry, short fi ction, and non-fi ction works by important literary
fi gures, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.7 Authors found pub-
lishing in the literary annuals lucrative. Their editors, too, including
women such as Sarah J. Hale and Lydia Sigourney in America and
Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Caroline Norton in England, often
made remarkably good livings from these volumes.
By modern standards, these books were extraordinarily expen-
sive and, thus, were generally gifts, given on special occasions and
as Christmas and New Year’s presents.8 They were, therefore, pub-
lished each October or November, expressly for the holiday season.
But they were also given at other times of year—for marriages,
anniversaries, and birthdays—by sweethearts, siblings, parents, and
close friends. They were titled to suggest value and beauty: The
Gem, The Ruby, The Pearl, The Amethyst, The Opal, The Bijou, The
Amulet, The Hyacinth. Their names sometimes refl ected their social
function: The Token of Friendship, The Gift of Love, Forget Me Not,
and Friendship’s Off ering. Most had an elaborately engraved or em-
bossed presentation page, with space for a personalized inscription
from purchaser to recipient.9
This gift had special cultural signifi cance. An American, the
Reverend S.D. Burchard, explained in 1845: “when we fi nd [literary
annuals] on the center and parlor tables of our kindred and friends,
7 Other important contributors to literary annuals included Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wad-
sworth Longfellow, and William Wordsworth.
8 In England, literary annuals sold for between eight shillings and four pounds (or eighty
shillings), depending upon the binding and the quality and size of the paper. Leafl ets of
Memory, one of the most sumptuous of the American annuals, sold in 1852 for six dollars
(data from publisher’s advertisements).
9 Often the book continued to be valued long after the demise of the relationship. Many
presentation plates found in surviving copies have the name of the giver erased or
scratched out.
8 the keepsake for 1829
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Savvy publishers, who created and then exploited this powerful
psychological strategy, were some of the earliest practitioners of
niche marketing in the history of the book trade. What might
otherwise have been a discretionary purchase became for some
young women an essential item for the drawing room table. An
anonymous “Introduction: Addressed to the Ladies,” published in
The Off ering for 1834, outlined the social meaning of an annual:
And when from the husband, the lover, or friend,
You receive, as a proof of aff ection,
The Off ering, oh, say what emotions must blend
With the gift, and cement the connection!
And how sweet, as you turn o’er its pages, to think
Such love as you there see depicted,
In large copious draughts, you, too, freely may drink,
Nor by judgment nor conscience restricted. (p. 8)
Thus, annuals could be physical mementos of desire or intimacy. As
a wry commentator for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine observed in
a review of The Literary Souvenir for 1825:
Do you wish to give a small earnest graceful gift to some
dearly-beloved one, then thank us for the happy hint, and
with a kiss, or, if that be not yet permissible, at least with a
smile of severest suavity ... lay the Literary Souvenir upon
her tender lap, with a very few words, which it would
be impertinent in us to particularize; only be sure ‘you
breathe them not far from her delicate auricle;’ and with
a low, a deep, and pleading tone, like the knight who won
the bright and beauteous Genevieve. It is a hundred to one
that you are a married man in six weeks or two months;
nay, if it be a ‘large paper copy,’ one fl esh will ye be before
the new moon.11
Annuals may have been too melodramatic or sentimental for some
tastes, but their social utility was inescapable.
10 “Annuals” in the Laurel Wreath (Hartford: S. Andrus & Son, 1845) 13.
11 (January 1825): 94.
introduction 9
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individuals of a certain means and, therefore, of a certain social class
could aff ord to give them. Because they were published annually,
having the latest one was essential to reaffi rming status. So the an-
nuals became a concrete embodiment of social aspiration.12
These were the Vogue magazines of their day, within whose pages
women could unabashedly study images of stylish, successful, and
alluring women, closely examining their hair, clothing, and acces-
sories. In short stories, images, and poems, readers could indulge
transgressive fantasy while exploring strategies for resolving ethical
dilemmas, attracting a suitor, and becoming more self-assured.13
Literary annuals functioned in ways similar to the modern-day
Valentine’s Day card and the coff ee table book. As a predecessor, they
have much to teach today’s readers about nineteenth-century popu-
lar culture, or as Frank Weitenkampf points out, the spirit of an age,
not only in literature and art, but in typography and book binding.14
The aesthetic of the literary annuals derived principally from two
traditions: (1) The pocketbook and almanac, originating in France
and Germany, to which Leigh Hunt called attention in an 1828 es-
say in The Keepsake.15 (2) The manuscript and commonplace book.
This tradition was an enormous infl uence, which has never been
properly recognized. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, men and women of the leisured class kept commonplace
books, or albums, which usually began as blank leaves bound in
fi ne leather. Their owners might copy out epigrams, sayings, poems,
or short quotes from favorite authors. Flowers and leaves could be
pressed alongside pencil or pen and ink sketches of places visited.
12 For more on this subject, see Richard Altick, English Common Reader, p. 362; Sonia
Hofkosh, “Disfi guring Economies,” p. 206; and Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, p.
111.
13 For a discussion of transgressive fantasy in The Keepsake, see Kathryn Ledbetter, “A
Woman’s Book: The Keepsake Literary Annual,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of South
Carolina, 1995.
14 “The Keepsake in Nineteenth-Century Art” in The Illustrated Book (Cambridge: Harvard
U. Press, 1938) 148.
15 The Forget Me Not for 1823 was a cross between a pocket diary, English almanac, and
German Das Tachenbuch. Das Tachenbuch was a small almanac containing poems, stories,
and engravings for each month opposite blank pages. For a discussion of the develop-
ment of the English literary annual, see Anne Renier, Friendship’s Off ering: An Essay on the
Annuals and Gift Books of the 19th Century (London: Private Libraries Association, 1964).
10 the keepsake for 1829