Coda: Scrapbooking and the Reconfiguration of Domestic Time

Abstract

In 1850, a young woman with the initials M. A. C. began compiling an album. She used a pre-printed volume made especially for the purpose, and probably given to her as a gift. In making this album, M. A. C. produced a far from straightforward record of domestic time. Albums are unique among nineteenth-century print practices in that they represent a close proximity between consumption and production; the album’s owner or contributors cut out, re-organized, pasted and embellished printed matter according to their own whims. Material was captured out of the flow of the print marketplace and fixed in the manuscript volume for a local, domestic readership. In this final section of Time, Domesticity and Print Culture, I will trace the conceptualization of domestic time that emerges from nineteenth-century albums. Of a necessity, the discussion will at times turn speculative — albums are apt to frustrate fixed interpretations — but in order to expand our understanding of the production of time by print culture, it is vital that we examine modes of representation even if the referents are hazy and the chances of misreading are high. Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord have asserted that as serial culture became ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, ‘newspapers and other periodicals defined knowledge as a material commodity distributed, consumed and disposed of on a regular basis’.¹