Confession album

Last updated
A page from a confession album Confession Album 1.JPG
A page from a confession album

The confession album, or confession book, [1] was a kind of autograph book popular in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Instead of leaving free room for invented or remembered poetry, it provided a formulaic catechism. The genre died out towards the end of the century, with occasional brief revivals in the twentieth century. The same kind of form is now found in the Dutch vriendenboek ("friends book"), and German Freundschaftsbuch ("friendship book"), used by small children; and the questions that the confession album contained live on in the Proust Questionnaire often used for celebrity interviews.

Contents

Questions

The questions posed in a confession album varied from volume to volume. A typical set of questions, in a book from the 1860s, is given below along with the answers of one respondent (see picture, right). The same set of questions were presented to Queen Victoria's second son, Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1873, [2] to Marcel Proust around 1885 and to Claude Debussy in 1889. [3]

QuestionAnswer
Your favourite virtue.Benevolence
Your favourite qualities in man.Fearlessness & Uprightness
Your favourite qualities in woman.Constancy & Affability
Your favourite occupation.Riding
Your chief characteristic.Reserve
Your idea of happiness.Doing an act of kindness for anyone
Your idea of misery.A fashionable dinner party in Town
Your favourite colour and flower.Violet - The Moss-rose
If not yourself, who would you be?A country squire with a comfortable income.
Where would you like to live?Near Exeter.
Your favourite prose authors.Lord Macaulay & Dickens.
Your favourite poets.Byron & Longfellow.
Your favourite painters and composers.Reubens & Handel
Your favourite heroes in real life.Wellington & Havelock
Your favourite heroines in real life.The Sisters of Mercy
Your favourite heroes in fiction.Oliver Twist & Verdant Green
Your favourite heroines in fiction.None known to me.
Your favourite food and drink.Haunch of Venison & "Madeira"
Your favourite namesArthur. Herbert. Catherine. Edith. Josephine.
Your pet aversion.Having a stout and stupid person to dance with.
What characters in history do you most dislike?Richard III & Oliver Cromwell.
What is your present state of mind?In a state of delightful uncertainty.
For what fault have you most toleration?Slowness.
Your favourite motto"No rose without thorns."
J. P. Ilbert.

Among the questions found in other albums, several seem designed to help courtship, sometimes with a reflection of changing relations between the sexes, for instance "What is your opinion of the girl of the period?", " What is your opinion of the man of the period?" [4]

History

Britain and America

The cover of a confession album from the late 1860s Confessions cover.JPG
The cover of a confession album from the late 1860s

The origins of the confession album are unclear. Samantha Matthews notes the similarity to oracle games of the first half of the nineteenth century (she cites examples from 1810 to 1852). These interactive books, which bore titles such as The Young Lady's Oracle: A Fireside Amusement, included questions that resemble those of the confession albums (for instance "Which is your favourite flower?", "Which is your favourite historical character?"), including sexually distinguished questions appropriate to courtship (for instance, "What is the character of your lady love?", "What is the character of him you love?"). [5]

Whatever their origins, confession albums were an established form by the 1860s: Henry d'Ideville records using an album in 1861 (see Germany and France below); Karl Marx filled out answers to one in the spring of 1865 (his favourite colour was red); and Friedrich Engels answered another in 1868 (his idea of happiness was Château Margaux 1848). [6] Early albums often had blank pages into which owners would paste the questionnaires; the questions on these could be preprinted or handwritten. [7] One such album, with handwritten questions, was that of Karl Marx's daughter Jenny, which contains entries dated from 1865 to 1870. For some of these, she sent the questions to friends, asking them to fill them out and return them. Her comments in a letter of November 1865 suggest that she regarded the genre as a novelty: [8]

I have a whole book filled up in that way and the answers are very amusing when compared with one another. These Confession books have put albums and stamp books quite into the shade. … I should much like to have answers. It is more interesting and amusing than a mere Autograph.

By the end of the decade, the printed and bound confession book had been introduced. The earliest currently known example with a printed publication date is Mental Photographs, an album published in New York in 1869, which contained the place for a photograph as well as the set of questions (a combination already found in Jenny Marx's album). [9] The albums seem to have enjoyed their greatest popularity in the following decades, but to have become unfashionable by the early years of the twentieth century. At their height, confession albums were widespread enough that in 1883 Douglas Sladen could rely on readers' familiarity with the form to play on it with a poetical answer. [10] He begins:

My favorite virtue, I confess, is chivalrous devotedness,
My favorite quality in man, the manful genius that can
With iron will and eye sublime, up to the heights of empire climb;
Although in woman, as I think, gentleness is perfection's pink

This ubiquity was accompanied by a certain exasperation. In a novel of 1886, a character asks: [11] "A propos of the confessional, did any of you ever come under the torture of that modern Inquisition, the 'Confession Book?'" Early twentieth century writers look back on the books as a long unfashionable genre. A writer in 1915 records: [12]

So far as I can recollect it was voted a bore at the end of the 'seventies and, except in suburban homes, such as my own, was never referred to except with a yawn or a smile after the early eighties.

The Daily Chronicle in 1906 remarks: [13] "'If not yourself, who would you rather be?' was a favourite question of the confession album of the seventies." A. A. Milne (1882–1956) looked back in 1921 on the album as something from his childhood: [14]

The confession-book, I suppose, has disappeared. It is twenty years since I have seen one. As a boy I told some inquisitive owner what was my favourite food (porridge, I fancy), my favourite hero in real life and in fiction, my favourite virtue in woman, and so forth.

Some album producers saw World War I as an opportunity to revive the confession book. The new albums, unlike their Victorian predecessors, ignored questions appropriate to courtship. They were clearly intended to be filled out by soldiers, a point spelt out in the title of one: My Brave Friend's Confession Book (1915). [15]

Germany and France

According to Henry d'Ideville, he had an "album-questionnaire" in which he collected the responses of friends and acquaintances in 1861, when as a diplomat in Naples he took the answers of Urbano Rattazzi and Mme de Solms, which he reproduces. His account, written in 1872, explains the nature of the album, as though he did not expect readers to be familiar with it: [16]

Here is what the operation consists of: you pose a series of questions to the unfortunate subject of the interrogation and he has to answer them one after the other. – What poet, what painter, what occupation, what pleasure, what sensation, etc. etc. do you prefer? The answers are written down, then the person signs and dates his interrogation and that's the game over.

British confession albums also circulated on the continent (see Questions above), and (perhaps in imitation of them) there were also questionnaire books in other languages. In Germany there were several, notably Erkenne Dich Selbst! ("Know Yourself"), which first appeared in 1878 and survived to around 1900, going through at least 22 impressions, produced by Friedrich Kirchner (1848–1900). The Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, which belonged to the same publishers as Kirchner's album, set his questions to celebrities, a forerunner of the modern use of the Proust Questionnaire; facsimiles of these answers were in turn printed on the album. In France, two are known, both containing the word Confidences in the title to represent the English "confessions". Here to the Revue illustrée set confession album questions to the famous, including Zola and Verlaine. [17]

Revivals

Friendship books

In the Netherlands, where autograph books are very popular among young schoolchildren, publishers have recently started bringing out an alternative in the so-called vriendenboek or vriendjesboek ("Friends book"), which much like the confession album come preprinted with a set of questions about the respondents' hobbies, idols and wishes. Some children prefer the new format, which says more about the person answering, but most prefer the traditional autograph book, which leaves more room for their own creativity. [18] The modern German Freundschaftsbuch ("Friendship book") has the same kind of preprinted questions and is typically aimed at the same age group. [19]

Proust Questionnaire

In 1886, Marcel Proust, then a child of fourteen, filled out the answers to an English confession album, which bore the title Confessions. An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c. (his answers were auctioned in 2003 for $34,000). [20] Interest in Proust led to a later revival of the questions as a kind of formulaic interview for celebrities, first by Léonce Peillard in France in the 1950s, later in French and American television and in the magazine of the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , starting in 1980, [21] and in Vanity Fair since 1993, under the name of "The Proust Questionnaire", which disguises its unintellectual British origins. [22] This use too had been anticipated by nineteenth century journals (see Germany and France).

Slam Books

A slam book is a notebook (commonly the spiral-bound type) which is passed among children and teenagers. The keeper of the book starts by posing a question (which may be on any subject) and the book is then passed round for each contributor to fill in their own answer to the question.[ citation needed ]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ So called by e. g. A. A. Milne, Not that it Matters , London: Methuen (1921), 79; Once a Week , London: Methuen (1922), 180.
  2. ↑ The earliest dated answer in the album pictured is 1868. Prince Alfred's answers are given in A.M. Broadley, Chats on Autographs, London: T. Fisher Unwin (1910), 148-51, with the comment: "It is not often that Royalty honours one of those irritating social tortures entitled 'An Album of Confessions to Record Thoughts and Feelings.'" (online at archive.org).
  3. ↑ Touttavoult (1990), 14-17 (Proust) and 138-9 (Debussy).
  4. ↑ Matthews (2000), 137-8; 141; 145.
  5. ↑ Matthews (2000), 126-30.
  6. ↑ Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart, vol. 42 (1987), 567 and 674 (Marx); vol 43 (1988), 541 (Engels). For online transcriptions of the Marx and Engels confessions, and a reproduction of his entry in Jenny's confession book, see External links. Marx filled out answers on two other occasions, including one for his daughter Jenny's confession album, the book from which Engels' confession is taken. Omura et al. (2005) contains a facsimile of this album with some commentary and a (slightly inaccurate) transcription.
  7. ↑ Kohlbecher (2007), 26.
  8. ↑ Omura et al. (2005), 24-5
  9. ↑ R. Saxton (ed.), Mental Photographs. An Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits and Convictions New York: Leypoldt & Holt (1869). See Kolhbecher (2007), 25-6; 28-9; 32. The questions elicited a satirical response from Mark Twain, "Mental Photographs", published in Mark Twain's Sketches, London: Routledge (1872), 148-9 (online at archive.org).
  10. ↑ D. A. B. Sladen, "A Confession. (Written for a Lady's Character Book)" in Australian Lyrics, Melbourne and Sydney: George Robertson (1883), 39-40. The poem is quoted and discussed in Matthews (2000), 139-40.
  11. ↑ Annie G. Savigny, A heart-song of to-day (disturbed by fire from the 'unruly member'), Toronto: Hunter Rose (1886), Chapter 31 (online at Project Gutenberg).
  12. ↑ C.F. Really & Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions: Designed by a Late-Victorian London: Arthur L. Humphreys (1915), 7, cited in Matthews (2000), 132.
  13. ↑ Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary s.v. "confession" III.9 and in Matthews (2000), 132; similarly Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Ideas in 1905 London: Hurst & Brackett (1905), 25, speculates about a future revival of the "old confession book".
  14. ↑ A. A. Milne, Not that it Matters, London: Methuen (1921), 79.
  15. ↑ Matthews (2000), 132; 147-51.
  16. ↑ H. d'Ideville, Journal d'un diplomate en Italie, Notes intimes pour servir à l'historie du second empire, Turin 1859-1862, Paris: Hachette, 1872, 101 "Voici en quoi consiste l'opération: On adresse au malheureux interrogé une série de questions auxquelles il doit répondre successivement. – Quel poëte? quelle occupation? quel plaisir? quelle sensation, etc., etc., préférez-vous? Les réponses sont inscrites, puis la personne signe, date son interrogatoire et le tour est joué."
  17. ↑ Kohlbecher (2007), 28-9; 33-4.
  18. ↑ M. Van den Berg, "Zur Erinnerung, Poesiealben aus Flandern", Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 44 (1999), 247-59 (on this point 249).
  19. ↑ For instance Pettersson und Findus - Alle meine Freunde, illustrated by Sven Nordquist, Oetinger (2005), ISBN   978-3-7891-1330-7
  20. ↑ L. Van Gelder, "Arts briefing", New York Times, May 5, 2003.
  21. ↑ Kohlbecher (2007), 25; 29.
  22. ↑ "Proust Questionnaire".

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Marx</span> German philosopher (1818–1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

<i>The Communist Manifesto</i> 1848 political publication by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, without attempting to predict communism's potential future forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friedrich Engels</span> German philosopher (1820–1895)

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist. His family owned large textile factories in England and Prussia.

Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Dialectic may thus be contrasted with both the eristic, which refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another's argument, and the didactic method, wherein one side of the conversation teaches the other. Dialectic is alternatively known as minor logic, as opposed to major logic or critique.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Stirner</span> German philosopher (1806–1856)

Johann Kaspar Schmidt, known professionally as Max Stirner, was a German post-Hegelian philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. Stirner is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism and individualist anarchism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catechism</span> Summary or exposition of doctrine

A catechism is a summary or exposition of doctrine and serves as a learning introduction to the Sacraments traditionally used in catechesis, or Christian religious teaching of children and adult converts. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals – often in the form of questions followed by answers to be memorised – a format that has been used in non-religious or secular contexts as well. According to Norman DeWitt, the early Christians appropriated this practice from the Epicureans, a school whose founder Epicurus had instructed to keep summaries of the teachings for easy learning. The term catechumen refers to the designated recipient of the catechetical work or instruction. In the Catholic Church, catechumens are those who are preparing to receive the Sacrament of Baptism. Traditionally, they would be placed separately during Holy Mass from those who had been baptized, and would be dismissed from the liturgical assembly before the Profession of Faith and General Intercessions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eduard Bernstein</span> German politician and theorist (1850–1932)

Eduard Bernstein was a German social democratic Marxist theorist and politician. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he began to identify what he believed to be errors in Marxist thinking and began to criticize views held by Marxism when he investigated and challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history. He rejected significant parts of Marxist theory that were based upon Hegelian metaphysics and rejected the Hegelian perspective of an immanent economic necessity to socialism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Marx</span> English-born activist and daughter of Karl Marx

Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married the previous year, she poisoned herself at the age of 43.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Vogt</span>

August Christoph Carl Vogt was a German scientist, philosopher, popularizer of science, and politician who emigrated to Switzerland. Vogt published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology. All his life he was engaged in politics, in the German Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–49 and later in Switzerland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jenny von Westphalen</span> German theatre critic and political activist (1814–1881)

Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny Edle von Westphalen was a German theatre critic and political activist. She married the philosopher and political economist Karl Marx in 1843.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Marx</span> Daughter of Karl Marx (1845–1911)

Jenny Laura Marx was a socialist activist. The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868. The two committed suicide together in 1911.

Helen Macfarlane, born Barrhead, 25 September 1818, Renfrewshire, Scotland, died Nantwich, Cheshire, England 29 March 1860, was a Scottish Chartist feminist journalist and philosopher, known for her 1850 translation into English of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which was published in German in 1848. Between April 1850 and December 1850, Macfarlane wrote three essays for George Julian Harney's monthly, the Democratic Review and ten articles for his weekly paper, The Red Republican. In 1851 Macfarlane "disappeared" from the political scene. Until recent research by Macfarlane's biographer David Black and BBC Radio Scotland researcher and broadcaster Louise Yeoman, very little was known for sure about her early and later life.

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust, and often used by modern interviewers.

Karl Marx wrote a number of notebooks on the history of technology which so far remain unpublished in English. Their whereabouts were for a long time unknown but in the past they were read and discussed by Marxist researchers.

<i>The Poverty of Philosophy</i> 1847 French-language book by Karl Marx

The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as a critique of the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.

"Property is theft!" is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What Is Property? or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.

If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

<i>The Principles of Communism</i>

Principles of Communism is a brief 1847 work written by Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism. It is structured as a catechism, containing 25 questions about communism for which answers are provided. In the text, Engels presents core ideas of Marxism such as historical materialism, class struggle, and proletarian revolution. Principles of Communism served as the draft version for the Communist Manifesto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dialectical materialism</span> Philosophy derived from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, a philosophy of history, and a philosophy of Nature based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Juta</span>

Louise Juta, born Louise Marx was a bookseller and the sister of Karl Marx.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lion Philips</span> Dutch tobacco merchant

Lion Philips was a Dutch tobacco merchant. He is the grandfather of Gerard and Anton Philips of Philips Electronics, and was a financial supporter of Karl Marx.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.