Noting the Mind: Commonplace

Books and the Pursuit of the Self

in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Lucia Dacome

Ae for “Adversariorum methodus.” Be for “Beauty, Beneficience, Bread,

Bleeding, Blemishes.”1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a
word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers dili-
gently regulated access to information they reputed worth retaining. Following
this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts
and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary
words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his
“new method of making commonplace-books,” a method characterized by a
particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in
the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had
already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their
readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks
under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace
books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and ob-
jects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were
part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that
dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a

Thanks to Silvia de Renzi, Patricia Fara, Marina Frasca-Spada, Anne Secord, Valerie Tay-
lor, Richard Yeo, and, especially, Joseph Berkovitz, Simon Schaffer, Emma Spary, and the two
reviewers from JHI.
1
John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book. Translated out of French from the
Second Volume of the Bibliotheque Universelle, in John Locke, Posthumous Works of Mr. John
Locke (London, 1706), 311–36; and Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictio-
nary of the Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), I, entry on “Common–places” (in the second
edition of the Cyclopaedia [1738], changed to “Common-place-book”).
2
John Covel, master of Christ College, Cambridge (1638–1722), for example, collected in
his commonplace book botanical drawings and seals, see British Library, Add. 57.495.
603
Copyright 2005 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
604 Lucia Dacome

manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumu-

lation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth
century Locke’s new method promised to facilitate compilers’ task by provid-
ing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern
for the uncontrollable growth of the “Stock of Knowledge.”3 It did so by seek-
ing to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook,
while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied
on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some
were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order
their minds and thus turn them into better people.
Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were
still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at
the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning,
and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In
some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing
insights into compilers’ reading patterns and as biographical sources casting
light on compilers’ personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intel-
lectual and cultural significance of Locke’s own new method of compiling has

3
See Ann Blair, “Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy,” in Marina Frasca-Spada
and Nick Jardine (eds.), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge, 2000), 69–70; “Read-
ing Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” JHI, 64 (2003), 11–28;
and Richard Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
(1728) as ‘the Best Book in the Universe,’ ” ibid., 61–72.
4
See Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962);
Ruth Mohl, John Milton and his Commonplace Book (New York, 1969); Ann Blair, “Humanist
Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” JHI, 53 (1992), 541–51; Peter Beal,
“Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” ed. W. Speed Hill, New
Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991
(Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), 133–47; Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “lieu commun” L’invention
rhétorique dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris, 1996); Ann Moss, Printed Common-
place-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996); Richard Yeo, “Ephraim
Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces,” JHI, 57 (1996), 157–75;
Ann Blair, The Theatre of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, 1997); Ann
Moss, “The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace Book,” JHI, 59 (1998), 421–36;
Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiqu-
uity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2001); Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions:
Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2001), esp. Chapter 4; Helmut
Zedelmaier, “Lesetechniken. Die Praktiken der Lectüre in Neuzeit,” in Helmut Zedelmaier and
Martin Mulsow (eds.), Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2001),
11–30, esp. 21–25; and Florian Neumann, “Jeremias Drexels Aurifodina und die Ars excerpendi
bei den Jesuiten,” ibid., 51–61.
5
See Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books
of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson, and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century
(New York, 1992), and Kevin Berland, Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth A. Lockridge (eds.),
The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover (Chapel Hill, 2001); also see Stephen
Colclough, “Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading
Experience,” Publishing History, 44 (1998), 5–37, esp. 7–9.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 605

accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke’s own intellectual biography

(and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of
systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-
century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses
and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.
What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the
context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke him-
self contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay
concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-
identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and conscious-
ness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that
self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet
early in this period Locke’s proposal to make self-identity coextensive with
memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is
now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical
literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke’s critics doubted
that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered
about the destiny of the self during intervals of unconsciousness and found it
absurd to define personal identity in terms of something that was inherently
discontinuous. On this basis they attacked the Lockean self as intrinsically in-
constant and unstable.
It is worth noting that the time of the debate on the coherence and continu-
ity of the Lockean self was also the time of the dissemination of Lockean
commonplacing. While the instability of the Lockean self became the object
of a long and heated controversy, a parallel narrative celebrated Locke as a
“Master of thought” and a “Great Master of Reason and Method,” and in the
Cyclopaedia Ephraim Chambers presented Locke’s new method of compiling
as a worthy creation of “that great Master of Order.”9 This paper proposes to
6
See G. G. Meynell, “John Locke’s Method of Common-Placing, as seen in his Drafts and
his Medical Notebooks, Bodleian MSS Locke d. 9, f. 21, and f. 23,” The Seventeenth Century, 8
(1993), 245–67; Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 278-80; Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s
Cyclopaedia”; Blair, “Annotating,” 87–88; Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 110–15; and
Lorraine Daston, “Perché i fatti sono brevi?” Quaderni storici, 108 (2001), 745–70.
7
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), 328–48.
8
See for instance Udo Thiel, Lockes Theorie der personalen Identität (Bonn, 1983); Chris-
topher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Britain (Berkeley, 1988); and Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the
Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2000). A main protagonist
in the debate on the nature of the self in the eighteenth century was, of course, the Scottish
philosopher David Hume; see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, 1978), 251–
63.
9
See “Epistle Dedicatory,” in John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books;
written by the late Learned Mr. John Lock, Author of the Essay concerning Human Understand-
ing (London, 1706); William Lupton, The Resurrection of the Same Body (Oxford, 1711), 17;
and Chambers, Cyclopaedia, entry on “Common-places.”
606 Lucia Dacome

read the dissemination of Locke’s “new method” of commonplacing in the

context of the ordering techniques and practices of self-improvement that con-
tributed to legitimate Locke’s view of the self. It suggests that in eighteenth-
century Britain Lockean compiling offered an arena in which new needs of
order and stability were elaborated in association with new notions of indi-
viduality and self-control. Commonplace books will be accordingly examined
as one of the arenas in which the view that self lay in conscious memory was
legitimated as the result of a negotiation between notions of order, practices of
self-improvement, social demands, and visions of the intellectual world.

Locke’s Methods of Making Commonplace Books

Locke started annotating commonplace books when he arrived in Oxford

in 1652 to become a student of Christ Church College.10 He continued to com-
monplace during his medical studies and through the accumulation of the vol-
umes of his library.11 Around 1660 “he began to use what is generally called
‘his method of commonplacing.’ ”12 Having initially practiced the new method
for himself, Locke communicated it to some of his friends, including Nicolas
Toinard, whom he had met in the late 1670s.13 Toinard became himself a de-
voted follower of the Lockean method, and convinced Locke to publish it.14
But when the new method was first published in 1686, Locke had experienced
a predicament that he could not have foreseen in the early days of his
commonplacing. In 1683 he had fled to Holland in voluntary exile following a
season of political reaction against Whig sympathizers.15 Away from home and
far from his library, he may have then fully appreciated the advantages of a
method that made it possible to annotate much in just one notebook.
In 1685 Locke prepared a text in English containing “not only a descrip-
tion but an example” of his method, and sent it to Toinard with a view to a
possible publication in a French periodical.16 Toinard asked Locke to translate
the text into Latin or French, and Locke started to work on a Latin version to be
published either in French in the Journal des Sçavans or independently in Latin.17
In 1686 Locke’s new method was brought out in French in the second tome of
10
See Meynell, “John Locke’s Method,” 245.
11
See G. G. Meynell, “A Database for John Locke’s Medical Notebooks and Medical Read-
ing,” Medical History, 42 (1997), 473–86.
12
Meynell, “John Locke’s Method,” 245.
13
The Correspondence of John Locke (VIII, Oxford, 1976–89), ed. De Beer, I, 579.
14
See Henry Ollion (ed.), Lettres inédites de John Locke (The Hague, 1912), 42–43, and
The Correspondence, ed. De Beer, II, 79, 119–20, 659–60, 691–93, 695, 701, and 710–11.
15
Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957), 227–30.
16
The Correspondence, ed. De Beer, II, 691–93. The English text sent to Toinard is now in
British Library, Add 28.728 ff. 54–63.
17
The Correspondence, ed. De Beer, II, 695 and 701. British Library, Add 28.728 ff. 46–53
contains a Latin version of the English text Locke sent to Toinard.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 607

Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique in form of a letter ad-

dressed to “Monsieur N.T.,” that is, Nicolas Toinard.18 It appeared anonymously,
and this is worth emphasizing, for it did so at a time in which not only was
Locke in exile, he was also new to the world of authorship. By the mid-1680s
Locke had already worked on some of his main writings, but he still had to
publish them.19 Thus, when the letter from a “Monsieur J.L.” (not better iden-
tified than for his affiliation to “la Societé Roiale d’Angleterre”) appeared in
1686, it is not clear how many readers may have guessed the name of the au-
thor. Even so, the new method met “with General Approbation from the
Learned.”20 All the more, when Jean Le Clerc publicized in the Bibliothèque
Choisie of 1705 the events that lay behind the publication of the new method
and the name of Locke as its author, the advantages of Locke’s method were
unlikely to pass unnoticed.21 Locke had died in 1704 as a famous and cherished
author. In 1706, when Locke’s method became available in two slightly differ-
ent English translations, one of the editors justified the publication of the new
method precisely by referring to Locke’s popularity, and emphasizing that no
apology was needed for publishing a work, which “was writ by that Great Master
of Reason and Method, the late Learned Mr. Lock.”22
Thanks to the new method, in the course of the eighteenth century Locke
was acclaimed as the author of one of the best methods of compiling. But be-
fore finalizing the new method, he himself had tried a number of different
compiling techniques.23 Locke’s own surviving commonplace books provide
the evidence of his changing patterns of compiling and his struggle with the
organization of space.24 In one the notebooks, for example, Locke listed the
letters of the alphabet on the top of the page and annotated excerpts under the
relevant letter.25 This scheme of organization facilitated the annotation of the
entries but ran the risk of cramming parts of the notebooks, while leaving oth-
ers empty. With a variation on this scheme Locke arranged entries alphabeti-

18
John Locke, “Methode nouvelle de dresser des Recueils. Communiquée par l’Auteur,”
Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique (Amsterdam, 1686), II, 315–40.
19
See Rosalie L. Colie, “John Locke in the Republic of Letters,” ed. Jean S. Yolton, A Locke
Miscellany: Locke Biography and Criticism for All (Bristol, 1990), 55–74.
20
Epistle Dedicatory, in Locke, A New Method of Making.
21
Jean Le Clerc, “Eloge du feu Mr Locke,” Bibliothèque Choisie (Amsterdam, 1705), VI,
375–76, published in English in 1706.
22
“Epistle Dedicatory,” in Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books.
23
See Meynell, “John Locke’s Method.”
24
See for instance Bodleian Library, Lovelace Collection: MS.Locke.b.4; MS.Locke.c.31;
MS.Locke.c.33; MS. Locke.c.42; MS.Locke.c.43; MS.Locke.c.44; MS.Locke.d.1; MS.Locke.d.9;
MS.Locke.d.10; MS.Locke.d.11; MS. Locke.e.17; MS.Locke.f.14; MS.Locke.f.15;
MS.Locke.f.21; MS.Locke.f.23; MS.Locke.f.24; MS.Locke.f.25; MS.Locke.f.27; MS.Locke.f.28;
MS. Locke.f.29. MS.Locke.f.33; and British Library, Add. 32.554.
25
Bodleian Library, Lovelace Collection, MS Locke.c.33, f. 9.
608 Lucia Dacome

cally on the basis of a combination of letters pairing the first letter of a word
with its first vowel such as “Io” for “Invocatio.”26 Again, this modification
allowed for a more systematic organization of space, but it still ran the risk of
resulting in an uneven use of the page and a complicated retrieval of informa-
tion. Drawing on this latter pattern, Locke’s new method tackled the problem
of space by adding to the commonplace book a special alphabetical index that
had the task of organizing the order of annotations (Figure 1). Locke himself
exemplified the role of the index by explaining to readers what he did when he
had to annotate a new entry:

When I meet with any thing that I think fit to put into my Common-
Place-Book, I first find a proper Head. Suppose, for example, that the
Head be EPISTOLA, I look into the Index for the first Letter and the
following Vowel which in this instance are E.I. If in the space marked
E.I. there is any number, That directs me to the Page designed for words
that begin with an E and whose first Vowel, after the initial Letter, is I.
I must then write under the word Epistola in that Page what I have to
remark.27

When the relevant page number could not be found in the index, one would
have to look for the first “backside of a Leafe” that is blank and write down the
relevant page-number in the index.28
The procedure was rather complex. Yet “an Experience of several Years”
had shown its usefulness to Toinard and several of his friends as well as to
Locke.29 Thanks to this procedure, anything worth remembering could be safely
stored for future use because annotations scattered in the book could be easily
retrieved by casting a quick glance at the index. Ann Blair has suggested that
the growing relevance of the index in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writ-
ings is symptomatic of a change in the demands of systematization faced by
natural philosophers.30 Locke himself explicitly mentioned the advantages of
an exact index against the inconvenience of having to turn over a whole book
to find a passage.31 But even traditional alphabetical indexes could end up forc-
ing compilers to start a new commonplace book before they had made the most
out of the space that was available in the previous one. In contrast Locke’s
index promised to bring about a particularly economic use of space.

26
Bodleian Library, Lovelace Collection, MS Locke.c.33, f. 33.
27
Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, 317–18.
28
For an analysis of Locke’s method, see Meynell, “John Locke’s Method.”
29
Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, 314–15.
30
Blair, “Annotating,” 69–89.
31
Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, 323–24.
 Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain
John Locke’s Index. From John Locke, A New Method of a Commonplace-Book, Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke

609
(London, 1706). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library, Yale University.
610 Lucia Dacome

Memory and the Art of Commonplacing

By the time Locke completed his new method, the relationship between
knowledge and space, the storing of information and its retrieval, had already
been at the center of a long-standing tradition of learning. In fact commonplacing
had been familiar to the Ancients as well as the Moderns. As part of a pedagogic
heritage that dated back to the classical age, in the premodern and early modern
periods commonplace books consolidated their role within the tradition of topica
related to oratory and the art of memory.32 While mediating ancient texts and
classical knowledge, and contributing to the transmission of selected florilegia
and moral sententiae, commonplace books were meant to help students and
scholars to manage substantial amounts of knowledge. Facilitating the memo-
rization of sentences and arguments, they provided a means to enhance perfor-
mance in public situations. One of the purposes of early modern commonplace
books was in fact to offer reserves of arguments and topics to those who wanted
to show inventive genius by elaborating upon them. In his work on linguistic
plenitude, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512), for instance, Erasmus
urged students to compile a commonplace book in order to aid their memory
and thus attain a fertile mode of expression. Erasmus’s method for organizing
loci communes was related to the notion of copia, that is, plentiful accumula-
tion of proofs and arguments that were meant to enhance eloquence.33 When a
topic had to be expanded in the course of a speech, the speaker could collect
materials from the various places stored in the memory or in the notebook and
then skillfully integrate them together into a coherent whole. In this sense the
practice of compiling crucially contributed to the self-fashioning of the court-
ier and the orator as well as to the training and self-cultivation of the student
and the learned.34
Seeking to facilitate the storing and retrieval of information, Locke’s new
method of commonplacing built on this tradition, but its qualification as “new”
also pointed to an intention of reform. Like former compiling techniques Locke’s
method provided a tool for managing substantial amounts of knowledge. But
unlike former methods of commonplacing it was not primarily concerned with
the transmission of a specific body of knowledge prescribing the matter to be
annotated. Nor was it devoted to the accumulation and memorization of argu-
ments and proofs, for it focused rather on the ordering procedure. In his “Mon-
sieur Le Clerc’s Character of Mr. Lock’s Method,” published along with the

32
See Lechner, Renaissance Concepts; Blair, “Humanist Methods”; Beal, “Notions in Gar-
rison,” 135; and Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books.
33
Desiderius Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, tr. Donald B. King and H. David Rix
(Milwaukee, 1963), esp. 67–68 and 87–97.
34
Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, 166–69, and Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority:
Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993).
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 611

New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, Le Clerc observed that the new

method was “extraordinary useful” and emphasized that, although many had
written much on the subject, he had “never met with a better and more easie
Method.”35 Drawing attention to the advantages of order, Le Clerc advised com-
pilers to avoid the transcription of entire “Sentences” and rather extract only
“those Things which are Choice and Excellent” and those which “we cannot so
readily call to mind, or for which we should want proper Words and Expres-
sions.”36
Le Clerc’s public appreciation of Locke’s new method and Toinard’s pri-
vate devotion to it may be read in the context of growing dissatisfaction for
traditional methods of commonplacing. In his writings, Locke himself had cau-
tioned against the memorization of arguments and sentences. In Some Thoughts
Concerning Education he observed that, although it might not be amiss to ex-
ercise the memory of young scholars with remarkable quotations, stuffing the
head with “scraps of Authors got by heart” ran the risk of providing a student
with “the Furniture of a Pedant.”37 In The Conduct of Understanding Locke
furthermore criticized the habit to collect and memorize arguments on the
grounds that it misguided the understanding, made an individual “a retainer to
others” and did not grant any solid foundation to knowledge. He acknowledged
that the accumulation of sentences that was “very familiar among bookish men”
could bring them “to furnish themselves with the arguments they meet with pro
and con in the questions they study.” But he maintained that although such
“arguments gathered from other men’s thoughts, floating only in the memory,”
could supply “copious talk with some appearance of reason,” they did not help
scholars “to judge right nor argue strongly, but only to talk copiously on either
side, without being steady and settled in their own judgments.” Moreover, “the
multiplying variety of arguments” cumbered the memory to no purpose.38
Locke’s remarks on memorization were not formulated in isolation. By the
eighteenth century the memorization of sentences had come to be regarded as
an obsolete practice informing images of pedantry personified by the bore, the
impolite, and the pedant. Manuals of polite education accordingly warned against
those who had the habit of “stalking about like walking Libraries and moving
Folio’s spouting about their Heathen Quotations here and there.”39 As histori-

35
Le Clerc, “Monsieur Le Clerc’s Character of Mr. Lock’s Method, with his Advice about
the Use of Common-Places,” in Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, ii.
36
Ibid., iii.
37
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Oxford, 1989), 231-32; on Locke’s
attitude towards contemporary practices of learning, see Richard Yeo, “John Locke’s ‘Of Study’
(1677): Interpreting an Unpublished Essay,” Locke Studies, 3 (2003), 147–65.
38
John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding (New York, 1966), 67–69, published
in his Posthumous Works in 1706.
39
The Polite Student (London, 1748), 32–33.
612 Lucia Dacome

ans have shown, from antiquity to the early modern period, memory provided a
privileged repository of information. The art of memory was accordingly re-
garded as a fundamental medium of conservation and transmission of knowl-
edge.40 Even the circulation of printed books did not at first affect the centrality
of the art of memory in the world of learning, and rather supported its dissemi-
nation. However, “once knowledge was conceived as an open-ended search
that could displace accepted truths, the prospect of holding all important knowl-
edge in the memory seemed impossible.”41 The art of memory accordingly came
to be regarded as an intellectual exercise that lacked judgment and understand-
ing, and could be used to talk about things one knew nothing about.42 The
improvement of memory continued to maintain its role as a pedagogic require-
ment exercising its demands on individuals. Yet methodic thinking and writing
were increasingly advocated as better means for the enhancement of memory
than traditional mnemotechnics may have been.43 Locke himself wrote to have
devised his method “of making collections” in order to assist his bad memory.44
Locke’s own suggestion that self-identity was coextensive with conscious
memory may be read in the context of shifting views of the nature of memory
and its role in the world of learning. His critique of memorizing as a vehicle of
pedantry may accordingly be placed in a setting in which commonplace books
were fashioned more as tools of orderly thinking and repositories of individu-
alized memories than as the storehouses of a stable body of knowledge. This
does not mean that the classical heritage ceased to provide a source of inspira-
tion for eighteenth-century compilers. Le Clerc himself praised Locke’s new
method for being “very well adapted, not only to the Latin, but also to the
Greek Tongue.”45 Moreover, when in 1707 the third Earl of Shaftesbury used
Lockean commonplacing to organize notes for his project on the Second Char-
acters (Figure 2), he drew on classical authors and themes, as he customarily
did as part of his habit to resort to classical culture for models and inspiration
and his appropriation of the classics as a powerful means for legitimating his
own philosophical undertakings.46 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education

40
See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), Mary J. Carruthers, The Book
of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), Paolo Rossi, Logic and
the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, tr. Stephen Clucas (Chicago, 2000),
esp. Chapter 1.
41
Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 80.
42
See Rossi, Logic, Chapter 5.
43
See René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, tr. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge, 1985), I, 67.
44
British Library, Add 28.728 f. 56 v.
45
Le Clerc, “Monsieur Le Clerc’s Character,” ii.
46
TNA, PRO 30/24/27/25. See Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Polite-
ness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge,
1994), 41–47.
 Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain
The index of Shaftesbury’s commonplace book for his project on the Second Characters.

613
The National Archives, PRO 30/24/27/15, f. 110.
614 Lucia Dacome

Locke himself observed that many passages that were worth remembering were
to be found “in the ancient Authors.”47 He also chose to illustrate the new
method through traditional headings such as Ebionitae, Acheron, Haeretici,
Confessio Fidei. Yet, as Ann Moss has suggested, the very erudition that in-
formed the Latin examples presented by Locke was no longer “mapped on to
any pre-existing conceptual grid.”48 In 1725 the Dissenting poet and writer
Isaac Watts (1674–1748) expressed appreciation for this aspect of Lockean
commonplacing when in his Logick he presented “Mr. Lock’s Method of
Adversaria, or common Places” as “the best; using no learned Method at all”
and “setting down Things as they occur.”49 As late as 1770 John Bell similarly
praised Lockean commonplacing because it allowed compilers to “form a sys-
tem of useful and agreeable knowledge, in a manner peculiar to themselves.”50
Moreover, although in the New Method Locke advised prospective compilers
to devote separate commonplace books to moral philosophy, natural philoso-
phy, and “the Knowledge of Signs,” in his own unpublished commonplace
books he himself used the new method to record all sorts of things.51 His com-
monplace books accordingly accommodated, ordered and classified the most
disparate types of information—both scholarly and unscholarly—from miscel-
lanea and memoranda to recipes and lists of books, from medical notes and
moral and theological maxims to accounts of debts. On the face of it things
may have looked messy. Yet, the promise that lay behind the employment of
the new method was that miscellaneous as they might have been, collections
could be brought together under the same ordering pattern. In so far as they
could be encircled, they would also enhance the order of compilers’ minds.

Trust in Order

In the Preface to his Cyclopaedia Ephraim Chambers famously empha-

sized that, miscellaneous as they may have looked, the materials that informed
his work were “capable of the Advantages of a continued Discourse.” All one
had to do was to choose an appropriate form, order, and economy of organiza-
tion, and thus “dispose such a Variety of Materials in such manner, as not to
make a confused Heap of incongruous Parts, but one consistent Whole.”52 In
general, even when collections were “general and promiscuous” with “num-

47
Locke, Some Thoughts, 232.
48
Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 279.
49
Isaac Watts, Logick: Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (London,
1725), 117.
50
Bell’s Common Place Book, Form’d generally upon the Principles Recommended and
Practiced by Mr. Locke (London, 1770).
51
Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, 322.
52
Chambers, Cyclopaedia, I, i; and see Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 114–19.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 615

bers and things thrown precariously together,” it was possible sometimes to

“discover Relations among them, which we should never have thought of look-
ing for.”53 The view that, fragmented and disorderly as they may have looked,
collections could ultimately be encircled thanks to the choice of a proper order-
ing method, famously informed and transformed eighteenth-century collecting
activities as well as encyclopedic projects. As a practice that organized and
classified collectanea by giving them a place, a case and a label, the practice
commonplacing was conceptualized as a means of order. In his “Character of
Mr. Locke’s Method” Le Clerc emphasized that commonplacing was particu-
larly useful because it taught students “the Art of putting Things in Order.”54 In
the Cyclopaedia Chambers similarly fashioned the New Method as a means of
order.
In eighteenth-century Britain order was a ubiquitous notion that served a
moral and social as well as a practical agenda. It was presented in natural dis-
plays and was pursued in accountants’ meticulous records of trade.55 It pointed
to the perfection of the divine design in nature and catered to parameters of
taste. Emma Spary has drawn attention to the significance of this agenda in the
pursuits of eighteenth-century natural historians: as the very acquisition of natu-
ral historical knowledge “repeated the steps of self-development judged neces-
sary for the enlightened individual,” natural historians “made the transition
from natural (the brute) to social (members of the polite society) by recapitu-
lating the Adamitic process of generating order from an initial perceptual
chaos.”56 The practice of commonplacing similarly came to be regarded as ca-
pable of bringing together the order of learning and the methodizing of one’s
thoughts, the pursuit of self-improvement, and the fashioning of the polite indi-
vidual. While collecting and ordering notes and thoughts, compilers also worked
on their own intellectual, moral, and social edification.
Indeed eighteenth-century commonplace books owed part of their success
to their capacity to instantiate a model of mental order. Supporters of Lockean
commonplacing such as Le Clerc lured compilers with the assurance that the
method provided a tool for ordering their memories as well as a way of saving
space in their notebook. But what did it mean to order one’s thoughts, and how
was one supposed to go about it? Both in the Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing and in the Conduct of the Understanding Locke dwelled upon the

53
Chambers, Cyclopaedia, I, xxix.
54
See Le Clerc, “Monsieur Le Clerc’s Character,” iv–v.
55
On the relationship between double entry book keeping, collecting practices, and
commonplacing see Anke Te Heesen, “Die doppelte Verzeichnung. Schriftliche und räumliche
Aneignungsweisen von Natur im 18. Jahrhundert,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Sci-
ence, Preprint 204 (Berlin, 2002).
56
Emma Spary, “The ‘Nature’ of Enlightenment,” in William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon
Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 295.
616 Lucia Dacome

consequences of mental wandering and disorderly thinking. He was wary of

the “constant succession and flux of ideas” that crossed, and potentially dis-
rupted the mind and maintained that one of the purposes of a proper training of
the understanding was to make sure that if some “foreign and unsought” ideas
were to offer themselves to the mind “we might be able to reject them, and keep
them from taking off our minds from its present pursuit, and hinder them from
running away with our thoughts quite from the subject in hand.”57 But taking
control over wandering thoughts was not an easy task. Nothing was in fact
“more resty and ungovernable than our thoughts,” and there was scarcely “any-
thing harder in the whole conduct of the understanding” than to get a full mas-
tery over them.58
In the course of the eighteenth century commonplacing came to be regarded
as a practice that could facilitate the task of “getting the habit of attention and
application” and thus disposing of one’s thoughts.59 In The Improvement of the
Mind (1741), for instance, Isaac Watts urged his readers to organize their minds
according to the same principles of order and method that characterized com-
monplace books. According to Watts, “all Persons” were under the obligation
to cultivate their minds in order to obviate the risk that, if left to itself and
uncultivated, the mind would become a “barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown
with Weeds and Brambles.”60 Among other things they had to order new ideas
under proper headings.61 As Watts put it,

We should inure our Minds to Method and Order continually; and when
we take in any fresh Ideas, Occurrences and Observations, we should
dispose of them in their proper Places, and see how they stand and
agree with the rest of our Notions on the same Subject: As a Scholar
would dispose of a new Book on a proper Shelf among its kindred
Authors; or as an Officer at the Post-house in London disposes of ev-
ery Letter he takes in, placing it in the Box that belongs to the proper
Road or County. In any of these Cases if things lay all in a Heap, the
Addition of any new Object would encrease the Confusion; but Method
gives a speedy and short Survey of them with Ease and Pleasure.62

Watts’s suggestion to treat the mind like a commonplace book was not formu-
lated in isolation. Having encouraged readers to improve their memory by keep-

57
Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 94–95.
58
Ibid., 124.
59
Ibid., 95.
60
Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: Or, a Supplement to the Art of Logick (Lon-
don, 1741), 1–2.
61
Ibid., 240–41.
62
Ibid., 241.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 617

ing a commonplace book, compiling it according to Locke’s new method, and

reviewing it once a year, a few years later the Non-conformist divine John
Mason (1706–1763) similarly invited readers of his Self-Knowledge (1745) to
store and organize thoughts as they would arrange notes in a commonplace
book:

Think it not enough to furnish this Store-house of the Mind with good
Thoughts, but lay them up there in Order, digested or ranged under
proper Subjects or Classes. That whatever Subject you have Occasion
to think or talk upon you may have recourse immediately to a good
Thought, which you heretofore laid up there under that Subject. So
that the very Mention of the Subject may bring the Thought to hand;
by which means you will carry a regular Common Place-Book in your
Memory.63

Watts and Mason largely operated in Dissenting environments but obtained

a vast readership for their educational writings. Their views of self-improve-
ment and self-knowledge were formulated within the Protestant tradition of
self-scrutiny and self-examination and were reflected in the governing prin-
ciples of Dissenting Academies.64 Yet their writings exercised widespread ap-
peal at a time in which self-improvement came to be fashioned as a constitutive
characteristic of the polite individual. Mason’s Self-Knowledge went through
numerous editions and continued to be published into the nineteenth century.
As early as 1728 Watts observed in a letter to Benjamin Colman that his writ-
ings had received wide appreciation and were even read in Oxford and Cam-
bridge despite the latter’s proverbial “bigotry & hatred of ye Dissenters.”65 In
the Preface to his Improvement of the Mind, Watts also timidly opened to women
on the grounds that “in our Age several of the Ladies pursue Science with
Success; and others of them are desirous of improving their Reason even in
common Affairs of Life, as well as the Men.” Although he reckoned that “the
Characters” occasionally drawn in his work were “almost universally apply’d
to one Sex,” he also granted that “if any of the other shall find a Character
which suits them, they may by a small Change of the Termination apply and
assume it to themselves, and accept the Instruction, the Admonition or the
Applause which is designed in it.”66
63
John Mason, Self–Knowledge. A Treatise, shewing the Nature and Benefit of that Impor-
tant Science, and the Way to Attain it (London, 1745), 131–33.
64
Cf. “The Rules of Dr. Doddridge’s Academy at Northampton,” in T. Gasquoine et al., A
History of Northampton Castle Hill Church (Northampton, 1896), 63–71.
65
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series (Boston, 1895), IX, 341.
66
Watts, Improvement, xii–xiii. On women’s responses to eighteenth-century calls for self-
improvement, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eigh-
teenth Century (New York, 1997), 57–59, 197, and 606.
618 Lucia Dacome

By the mid-century Watts’s Logick was listed among “the Best Books for
Beginners in polite Learning, Arts, and Sciences” along with the works of au-
thors such as Addison, Cudworth, Le Clerc, Leibniz, Locke, and Newton.67
Later in the century, the popularity of his writings was testified by Samuel
Johnson, who remarked that Watts had “provided instruction for all ages, for
those who are lisping their first lessons, to the enlightened readers of Malbranche
and Locke.”68 Some eighteenth-century readers may have been exposed to the
advantages of Lockean compiling precisely through Watts’s and Mason’s popular
writings on the training of the mind. The very fashioning of commonplacing as
a tool of mental order and self-improvement may well have played a part in
boosting the popularity of the new method. Certainly, by the time the fourteen-
year-old Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), future antiquary and Presbyterian minis-
ter, observed in 1797 having been given by his tutor “a commonplace book
which was ruled after the manner of Locke,” Locke’s method of commonplacing
had attracted widespread consensus.69

Methodic Compilers

Advertised in 1706 as “necessary for all Gentlemen, especially Students of

Divinity, Physick, and Law,” and recommended in the Cyclopaedia (1728) as
the best method “which many learned Men have now given into,” the new
method was used in the course of the eighteenth century to annotate methodi-
cally disparate types of information.70 At the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury Daniel Burgess (1645–1713) followed Locke’s recommendations to anno-
tate in orderly manner heads from the Presbyterian lexicon such as parabola,
penitentia, peccatum originale, revelatio, and superstitio.71 In 1707, as we have
seen, the third Earl of Shaftesbury used Lockean commonplacing in order to
organize the notes for his project on the Second Characters including entries
such as “Demosthenes,” “Ego,” “Herodotus,” “Idol,” “Laocoon,” “Notes” (Fig-
ure 2). In about 1736, moreover, the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71) started his
life-long compiling activities with a commonplace book that annotated in
Lockean fashion poems, quotations, lists of books, indexes and notes, and in-
cluded Latin entries on “Affectus,” “Historia,” “Liberalitas,” “Libri,” “Meth-
odus,” and “Scientia.”72 Gray’s commonplace books covered the whole of Gray’s

67
Education of Children and Young Students in all its Branches (London, 17522), 25.
68
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (Oxford, 1905), III, 310.
69
British Library, Add. 24.879. Thanks to Stephen Colclough for making this information
available.
70
“Title-page,” in Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books and Chambers,
Cyclopaedia, entry on “Common-places.”
71
Bodleian Library, MS.Engl.misc.f.20.
72
“Poetic commonplace books and manuscripts of Thomas Gray, 1716–1771,” Cambridge
University Library, MS.Microfilm.9990.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 619

literary career, including the period of his Grand Tour with Horace Walpole.
Diligently and accurately compiled, they became in turn an exemplary instance
of the merits of Gray not only as a disciplined compiler but also as a champion
of personal and moral integrity; so much so that in 1763 James Boswell re-
ferred to them in his plan of self-improvement by addressing to himself the
injunction: “Get commonplace-book, like Gray.”73
In the course of the eighteenth century some compilers followed Locke’s
own rules, while others modified Locke’s method with variations that were
meant to facilitate the procedure. One compiler, for instance, simplified mat-
ters by annotating the entries directly in the index in the following way:74

a necdote 53
e
A i Artifice 145
o
u

By the end of the eighteenth century versions of the Lockean method started to
circulate in print and prospective Lockean compilers could purchase common-
place books with a pre-stamped version of the Lockean index. In 1770 John
Bell emphasized the practical outcomes of Lockean commonplacing “for men
of business as well as study.”75 In 1777 “a gentleman of the University of Cam-
bridge,” who published a New Commonplace Book based on the Lockean
scheme, noticed that “the great utility of Common-place Books” had already
“occasioned many plans for the regulation of them, to be laid before the pub-
lic” but that of Locke had “hitherto deservedly had the preference.”76 In 1782,
customers entering John Macnair’s shop in Glasgow could find along with
paper, pens, “stationary ware” and “books of all kinds,” a work on stenography
that included “A Specimen of Mr. Locke’s Index to a Common-place book.”77
Finally, in 1799 A New Commonplace Book, being an improvement of that
Recommended by Mr. Locke promised to provide a “well calculated remedy” to
the omissions of “the man who reads, and neglects to note down the essence of
what he has read; the man who sees, and omits to record what he has seen; the

73
Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell in Holland, 1763–64 (New York, 1952), 38.
74
Cambridge University Library, Add. 6664.
75
Bell’s Common Place Book, Form’d generally upon the Principles Recommended and
Practiced by Mr. Locke (London, 1770).
76
A New Commonplace Book, in which the Plan Recommended and Practised by J. Locke
is Enlarged and Improved (Cambridge, 1777), 1.
77
Stenography Compedized; or, an Improvement of Mr. Weston’s Art of Short-Hand: […]
To which is prefixed, A Specimen of Mr. Locke’s Index to a Common-place book (Glasgow,
1782).
620 Lucia Dacome

man who thinks, and fails to treasure up his thoughts in some place, where he
may readily find them for use at any future period.”78
All these versions of Lockean commonplacing tell us about the extent of
the popularity reached by the new method as a “useful & agreeable Compan-
ion, on the Road” and “in the Closet,” for “the Man of Letters,” “the Man of
Observation,” and “the Traveller & the Student.”79 They suggest that by the
end of the eighteenth century Lockean compiling had been of service to those
who observed and traveled as well as to those who read and did not move from
their desks. Organizing quotations, personal observations, and memorable sen-
tences, it had catered both for compilers’ need to gain control over their col-
lectibles and to their pursuits of self-improvement and mental control. For in-
stance, commonplacing had been considered capable of contributing to im-
prove memory and thus “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all
times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”80 Significantly, it had
done so at a time in which Locke’s own account of self-identity based on memory
was targeted as an apology for mental wandering and instability of self, a time
in which medical treatises and manuals of politeness became increasingly vo-
cal in warning Locke’s own polite and commercial readers against the risks of
“Inconstancy,” “Mutability of Judgment,” and “swift Change of Taste” that
were increasingly affecting their peers.81

Commonplace Books, Politeness, and the Pursuit of the Self

A recent strand in the historiography of the eighteenth century has drawn

attention to the phenomenon of a booming market of products, services and
remedies that addressed new needs for personal care and prescriptive ideals of
conduct. The implication this phenomenon had on images of the body, notions
of health, and parameters of taste has been the object of ongoing historical
research.82 Less attention has been devoted to the influence that calls for self-
improvement had on the definition of new standards of mental control. Yet the
making of the mental tools of the polite individual required the accomplish-
ment of new levels of attention.83 In this sense Shaftesbury’s own adoption of

78
A New Commonplace Book; being an Improvement of that Recommended by Mr. Locke
(London, 17992), 1.
79
Ibid., “Title-page.”
80
A New Commonplace Book, in which the Plan Recommended and Practised by J. Locke
is Enlarged and Improved, 1.
81
Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), 25, 26, and
242.
82
See for instance G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), esp. Chapter 4, and Colin Jones, “Pulling Teeth in
Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Past and Present, 166 (2000), 100–145, esp. 138.
83
On “mental tools,” see Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century:
The Religion of Rabelais, tr. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 150.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 621

Lockean commonplacing may be regarded as an instance of the correlation

between commonplacing, the pursuit of self-knowledge, and the social demands
associated with polite ideals of intellectual conduct.
Shaftesbury was Locke’s pupil and the grandson of Anthony Ashley Coo-
per, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke’s patron and one of the founders of the
Whig movement in the 1670s.84 Initially fascinated by Locke’s philosophical
personality, Shaftesbury ended up rebelling. Yet both his published writings
and his notebooks developed themes taken from Locke’s philosophical vocabu-
lary and his conviction that the self lay in the mind rather than in the body.85
Shaftesbury’s search for self-knowledge started early. When twenty-three, in
1694 (the same year in which Locke’s account of self-identity appeared in the
Essay), Shaftesbury confessed to Locke his commitment to the cause of the
nosce te ipsum by declaring: “What I count True Learning, and all wee can
profitt by, is to know our selves.”86 Shaftesbury’s published and unpublished
writings record the implementation of this statement. In them the motif of self-
knowledge stands out as a recurring obsession.87 “What am I? who? whence?
whose?—And to what or whom belonging? with what or whom belonging to
me, about me, under me?”88
Questions such as these lay at the center of Shaftesbury’s project of per-
sonal reform. While Shaftesbury was mulling over the answers, self-knowl-
edge was a concept under pressure. The controversy over Lockean selfhood
was ongoing and Shaftesbury reported: “Argument and Debate go on, still.
Conduct is settled. Rules and Measures are given out, and received.” As
Shaftesbury pointed out, the difficulties emerging from the controversy still
waited for an answer: “What constitutes the We or I?” Could “the I of this
instant, be the same with that of any instant, preceding or to come”?89 In ad-
dressing these questions, Shaftesbury self-consciously played with the con-
flicts of post-Lockean selfhood. For him as well as for Locke the self was in the
mind rather than in the body. For him as well as for Locke’s critics, placing the
self in the mind ran the risk of making it ephemeral and fragmented. Yet tran-
sience and instability were not the end of it. Lawrence Klein has remarked that
Shaftesbury’s own “experience of personal fragmentation brought forth a breath-
takingly ambitious project of self-organization, a thoroughly centered self, in-

84
On Locke’s tutoring of Shaftesbury, see Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury,
1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), 7–12.
85
See Klein, Shaftesbury, 28 and 40. See also Voitle, The Third Earl, 118–26 and 320–21,
and Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 106–7.
86
Quoted in Voitle, The Third Earl, 66.
87
See Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, Miscellaneous Reflections (IV, 1)
in Complete Works (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1989), I:2, 232, and 234. On Shaftesbury’s pursuit
of the self, see Klein, Shaftesbury, 70–80.
88
TNA, PRO 30/24/27/10, f. 200.
89
Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections (IV, 1), 232.
622 Lucia Dacome

tegral and consistent.”90 Having celebrated the instability of a fluctuating ego,

Shaftesbury also longed for steadiness and self-control.
In the literature Shaftesbury has often been presented as the philosopher of
sociability and the advocate of politeness and conversation.91 It is a portrayal
that may appear to be at odds with Shaftesbury’s obsession with inner-knowl-
edge and self-dialogue, and possibly it is so. As Klein has observed, in the
notebooks Shaftesbury portrayed himself as “populated by two personalities,
one gregarious and extroverted, the other reclusive and introverted”: cheerful,
talkative, sociable, Shaftesbury also fashioned himself as gloomy, bashful, and
solitary. Between public life and solitude, conversation and soliloquy, outer
appearance and inner knowledge, Shaftesbury found no obvious line of re-
conciliation.92 What was the relation between the “I” addressed in exercises of
self-examination, the soliloquy, and the sociable persona engaged in amiable
conversation? How could one concentrate on the analysis of the self while
facing the pressures of social life? Dilemmas such as these accompanied and
collided with Shaftesbury’s pursuit of self-knowledge.93 They disclose a per-
sonal conflict between Shaftesbury’s opposite commitments to public and in-
ner life, between what Shaftesbury called the “artificial” self and the “natural”
self.94
Such conflicts may be seen as inscribed in Shaftesbury’s project to link
philosophy with “Good-Breeding,” to regard it as a medium of “the Order of
the World,” and make it conform to the demands of politeness, sociability, and
pleasing conversation.95 Although Shaftesbury recurrently located the origins
of his project in ancient moral philosophy, he found in the classics a powerful
source of authority and legitimation for a novel undertaking.96 In fact, seeking
to re-define the modes and protagonists of learning, Shaftesbury’s project was
in line with contemporary calls for the displacement of philosophy from the
traditional loci of pedantry to the venues of polite association. In The Spectator
(1711-14), for instance, prophets of politeness such as Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele famously linked the pursuit of the values of politeness to the
necessity to bring philosophy “out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Col-
leges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea–Tables, and Coffee–Houses.”97

90
Klein, Shaftesbury, 83.
91
See Klein, Shaftesbury, and David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and
the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 11–13 and 20–
26.
92
See Klein, Shaftesbury, 72–80.
93
On Shaftesbury’s exercises of self-knowledge, see Klein, Shaftesbury, 81 ff.
94
For Shaftesbury’s “artificial self,” see TNA, PRO 30/24/27/10, f. 153 ff. For Shaftesbury’s
“natural self,” see TNA, PRO 30/24/27/10, f. 170 ff.
95
Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections (III, 1), 196 and 198. On Shaftesbury’s project,
see Klein, Shaftesbury.
96
Klein, Shaftesbury, 41–47.
97
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), I, 44.
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 623

Like Shaftesbury, they promoted conversation as a medium of social and cul-

tural cohesion in a community that ideally shared morals and manners. But
crucial as it was to polite culture, conversation was a particularly demanding
activity. Ruled according to elaborate protocols, it required method because “a
man who does not know how to methodize his thoughts has always a barren
superfluity of words.”98 Thanks to their capacity to provide, as a compiler an-
notated in 1730, assistance “to conduct and conversation” as well as “rules of
prudence” and “precepts of morality,” commonplace books had a part to play
in the training of the polite conversant.99 Shaftesbury’s own embracement of
Lockean compiling may be read in the context of his attempt to redefine the
correlation between self-knowledge as a requisite of the polite mind and con-
versation as one of the polite mind’s chief accomplishments.
Arguably, a similar approach to commonplace books still lay behind
Boswell’s self-injunction to “get commonplace book, like Gray,” that is, like
Locke, which we have seen above. Boswell addressed to himself the injunction
to get a commonplace book as part of the plan of self-improvement through
which he sought to get rid of his hypochondria and fashion himself as an ac-
complished gentleman. Boswell’s plan consisted of innumerable self-injunc-
tions that he annotated in his journal, and included imperatives such as: “Be
reserved and calm, and sustain a consistent character,” “Be in earnest to im-
prove,” “Get commonplace-book, like Gray,” “Read your plan every morning
regularly at breakfast, and when you travel, carry it in trunk,” “Get common-
place book,” “Learn retenue,” “Always be improving,” and “Be Gray. Be
retenue.”100 All of these self-reproaches talk about a prescriptive ideal, one
that, famously, Boswell almost invariably failed to accomplish.101 At the same
time they also testify to the way in which standards of conduct that had been
formulated within the culture of politeness had contributed to shape a view of
the self that was to be pursued by means of practices of self-improvement such
as commonplacing.102 In this sense Boswell’s reference to Gray’s common-
place book points to the special status obtained by commonplace books both as
repositories of the individual self and publicly recognized tokens of the moral
worth of their compilers.
This way of characterizing commonplace books at the intersection between
calls for self-improvement and the moral entrustment of self-discipline was, of
course, the reflection of a prescriptive ideal, and not surprisingly it did not gain

98
The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed in such Principles of Politeness, Prudence
and Virtue (London, 1747), I, 213.
99
Bodleian Library, MS.Engl.misc.d.310.
100
Pottle, Boswell, 3, 4, 38, 47, 249 et passim.
101
See Susan Manning, “Boswell’s Pleasures, the Pleasures of Boswell,” British Journal
for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20 (1997), 17–31.
102
See Berland et al. (eds.), The Commonplace Book, 33, and Chapter 10.
624 Lucia Dacome

unconditional consensus. In A Tale of a Tub, for instance, Jonathan Swift fa-

mously stigmatized contemporary compiling manias by emphasizing that al-
though commonplacing methods promised to render compilers capable “of
managing the profoundest, and most universal subjects” in a few weeks, noth-
ing prevented their heads from remaining empty while their commonplace books
were filling up.103 Even an advocate of the Lockean method such as John Ma-
son warned Lockean compilers that by confiding to their “Minutes or memo-
rial Aids,” they should not excuse “the Labour of the Memory,” which was
“one Disadvantage attending this Method.”104 But here lay one of the main
weaknesses of the fashioning of Lockean commonplacing as a means of the
pursuit of self-knowledge. The risk was that if the promise of an intimate con-
nection between commonplacing, the order of the mind, and the enhancement
of memory turned out to be a vain one, nothing guaranteed that self-knowledge
could rise above the bundle of annotations scattered in the commonplace book.
As a consequence the mind and by implication the self would run the risk of
remaining itself a collection of mental contents harboring neither unity nor
continuity. At a time in which autobiographical writing came to provide a pow-
erful means for reorganizing the inherent discontinuity of memory through the
continuity of writing, commonplacing ran the risk of becoming inadequate to
the task.105

Conclusion

In the course of the eighteenth century commonplace books compiled in a

Lockean manner took on a variety of meanings. They were notebooks that had
to be handled according to given rules and lay at the center of practices of
classification and representation of knowledge, which became ever more loosely
connected to the heads and categories that had informed the humanist tradition
of commonplacing. Focusing on the prescriptive ideals and views of the intel-
lectual world that played a part in giving sense to eighteenth-century
commonplacing, this paper has examined how Lockean compiling flourished
in an environment in which the order of one’s mind was valued as a sign of
social as well as personal accomplishment and moral integrity. As a changing
technology of learning, commonplacing substantiated new models of intellec-
tual conduct and new subjectivities. It did so by bringing together prescriptive
ideals, practices of learning, and the social stage that accommodated and cher-
ished the performance of mental control through polite conversation. The view

103
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Oxford, 1986), 71–72.
104
Mason, Self–Knowledge, 131.
105
On eighteenth-century autobiographical writing, see for instance Patricia Meyer Spacks,
Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.,
1976).
Commonplace Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain 625

that the self lay in the mind found legitimation in this context, a context in
which commonplace books manifested the intrinsic tension underpinning the
relationship between “the natural” and “the artificial” self, the private and the
public, and the introspective and the sociable and conversable. Reconstructing
what lay behind this process of legitimation requires also examining how prac-
tices such as commonplacing tailored habits of thinking, construed new do-
mains of knowledge, and fulfilled social demands. The story of the interlacing
between Locke’s “new method” of commonplacing and Locke’s “new” self is
but an episode in the more general history of the crafts and practices that played
a part in licensing philosophical views and ideas. More remains to be told.

University College London.