Scrapbooking cultures in twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

This thesis offers the first study of scrapbooking in Britain during the twentieth century. By adding newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards, and ephemera into their scrapbooks, Britons fashioned unique records of the world in which they lived. During the twentieth century, scrapbooking remained a popular activity, indebted to earlier Victorian traditions, but fuelled by new forms of mass media and leisure. Moving a primarily nineteenth-century scrapbooking literature firmly into the twentieth century, I use the themes of war, monarchy, rural life, and pornography, to illustrate the different ways in which historical actors engaged with the scrapbook genre. I argue that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new types of scrapbooking: Britons scrapbooked creatively, expanding the range of individual and communal purposes which scrapbooks could serve. Scrapbookers transformed their volumes into personal narratives, histories, surveys, and archives. I open my thesis by using cultural and commercial commentaries to reconstruct the broader cultural climate in which historical actors made their scrapbooks. I show how these commercial and cultural discourses commodified scrapbooking as a valuable form of personal expression. In subsequent chapters on war, the Royal Family, and pornography, I reveal how scrapbooking was a novel self-making practice, uniquely reliant on print media and ephemera. Rooted in the visual and the tactile, scrapbookers overcame the conventions associated with other forms of life writing, embracing the genre’s imaginative and fantastical potential. I also demonstrate how scrapbooks are unusually well-placed sites for exploring the enduring influence of conservative values. I devise the term ‘intimate conservatism’ to explore this type of scrapbooking in non-partisan settings. Scrapbooking was not only a personal practice, but a widespread communal activity too. In chapters on war and rural life, I chart how scrapbooks evolved to function as community histories and surveys, reorientating histories of archiving and sociology away from the pursuits of professionals to those of ordinary people. Drawing on scrapbooks, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, minutes, and oral histories, this thesis uncovers the rich social and cultural history of scrapbooking in twentieth-century Britain.