In this essay, I create a pedagogical scrapbook, piecing together my own research methods, the ways I engage with these methods on my own and with my students, and how students took the ideas generated through our class to explore the Romantic period in digital projects of their own invention. Approaching Romantic literature through collecting and scrapbooking as specific fields of material practice/pedagogy/culture yields a haptic and individual understanding of the period, its works, and its figures. A Romantic-era pedagogy that situates itself in this way highlights how readers across time have engaged with literature through cutting, pasting, and assembling, and how such scrapbooked responses to Romantic ideas and practices continue to take a variety of forms and to bridge the gaps between individual and popular conceptions of Romanticism.

My recent course on the Romantic movement, an intimate, upper-level seminar, consisting mainly of English majors, focused on developing a “practice” of reading Romantic literature within the context of material culture. Immersion in examples of material culture from the Romantic period, from scrapbooks to natural history collections to sheet music, offers students the opportunity to explore Romantic literature and philosophy in a popular historical context. The culminating assignment of the course is a digital scrapbook. This assignment is an innovative way for students to demonstrate awareness of material culture and gain a deeper understanding of course material. The digital nature of the assignment, though seemingly paradoxical in its usage of a digital medium to invest in material culture, allows students to “cut and paste” and share their reading of Romantic literature in a manner that adapts the scrapbook’s information processing function to the virtual space, making the connection established between the Romantic period and today dynamic and personal. Through the incorporation of objects and ephemera into the teaching of Romantic texts, material culture creates a bridge between past and present, between the text and the people reading it, and between the student and the abstract idea of the “Romantic movement.”

In developing this course, I situated my pedagogy within the larger movements in recent Romantic scholarship that have brought the material culture of the Romantic period to the center of what was, at least in my own university experience, a field immersed in textual close reading. While material culture and textual close reading are co-constitutive, grounding the study of Romanticism in material objects can tease out connections to larger cultural contexts that would otherwise be lost. The RÊVE Romantic Europe: Virtual Exhibition embraces material culture as the foundation from which our understanding of the Romantic period can grow. RÊVE offers a wealth of teaching opportunities that bring together the lives and works of Romantic writers. The site is structured around material objects and physical locations significant to Romantic era figures and works. Exploring the virtual exhibit through digital images and accompanying scholarship allows one to piece together a collection of knowledge and experiences that enhance the reading of Romantic literature. Reading one of John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne, for instance, is so much more impactful for students when they are able to examine an image of and read Anna Mercer’s essay about Brawne’s engagement ring. When we read Byron’s “Don Juan,” students read Diego Saglia’s essay on Teresa Guiccioli’s Traveling Chest; we then discuss the way such objects can become a “material container of celebrity.” Through exploring this site, students begin to assemble a collection of snapshots of these artifacts and scholarly insights that establish a foundation for our study of the Romantic period. To borrow the words of Judith Pascoe, students are able to use "collected objects as points for “imaginative take-off”; and, as such, these collected objects form the basis for a deeply material imaginative schema (16).

Through our shared study of material culture in this course, students develop meaningful connections to Romantic writers, Romantic philosophies, and to the texts that have been re-read and re-hashed so many times they have a life that exists beyond the pages on which they were originally written. The course emphasizes works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Shelley, in addition to our discussions of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord George Gordon Byron, and John Keats. Importantly, the second half of the class is spent developing a transatlantic understanding, so we read works by American writers, Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Brockden Brown. We then discuss the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, thinking through the ways that the history of slavery and narratives by enslaved people reveal a legacy of oppression that is key to understanding Romanticism on a global level. Finally, we turn to Indian poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Manu Samriti Chander’s work, Brown Romantics, to examine the complex ways that Romanticism was manifest in colonized spaces.

With each work, the course pairs textual analysis with material objects, reminding students of the pages, the paper on which the work was brought to life. This reminder brings them back to the writing process that created the work, connects them to the other objects that circulated around and/or inspired that work, and grounds poems like “Ode to a Nightingale” back in a reality with which they can connect. Through this process, the poem is transformed from a work they’ve read a hundred times into something that has real meaning to their lives. What would otherwise have been a text-based class becomes tactile and immediate for the students through material culture. During class sessions, we look at the garden around Keats’s house, we examine pictures of his study, we look at Keats’s original manuscript, we consider it in the context of his letters, we talk about the visceral imagery of the speaker’s wine-stained mouth and Keats’s love for Claret. The materiality surrounding the poem’s composition is used to heighten our awareness of Keats’s own use of materiality in his poems. The poem is alive and is part of the life of the writer who created it, a writer who was dying of tuberculosis and who, in heartbreak and hope, gave Fanny that engagement ring.

For the remainder of this essay, I will break down how material culture was integrated into this course on the Romantic movement and the ways it promoted student engagement and learning, encouraging students to develop not only a personal but a broad-reaching definition of “Romanticism.” First, I will discuss the process of developing a practice of reading Romantic texts in the context of material culture, especially cultures of collecting and scrapbooking. Then, I will highlight how this practice enlivens the study of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and John Keats’s poetry. Finally, I will establish connections between these material reading practices, digital culture, and the necessity of a globally situated and accessible program of Romantic study.

Developing a “material cultural reading practice” and what this offers to the study of Romanticism

In developing a reading practice rooted in material culture, students not only connect more deeply with the Romantic period but also become invested in the literature in ways that yield a life-long curiosity, a love of not only the movement but literature generally, and a broader understanding of Romanticism. This reading practice allows us to interrogate what it means for an English major to “love literature.” As Deidre Lynch writes, “It is as though those on the side of the love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities” (14). As a class, we seek to understand the complexities, the edges of this love through the material culture surrounding each text we read. Material objects reveal the often complicated or even uncomfortable realities surrounding the literature we have grown to love or, conversely, to reject.

When reading Charlotte Smith’s poem, “Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex,” for instance, we read Smith’s note about the rising sea near the town that resulted in the interred bodies, once in graves, being swept away, bones mingling with the sand on the shore. We examine and discuss bones and the later contributions of women like Mary Anning to early archaeology in our reading of the poem; the human remains Smith describes, swept onto the beach, mingle with the shells and become part of the evolving natural historical drama. The emphasis on the materiality of the bones helps my students understand Smith’s unique form of solipsism that takes root in the contemplation of natural history (see Pipkin). We read this poem after reading Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” and students immediately responded to the voice of Smith’s poet after our discussion of the bones. The sort of self-reflection they had seen in Wordsworth takes on a completely different meaning when reading Smith. Unlike Wordsworth’s use of the setting to reflect upon his own growth, Smith’s integration of the bones on the shore instills a sense of emotion and change that is much larger than her individual consciousness. Students then discuss how Smith’s gender affected this decision, and they are able to not only develop relatable connections to Smith’s work, but also to the material reality of the bones and the study of the oft-overlooked women who collected other bones on other beaches. This process helps the class confront the realities of the challenges faced when compiling the literary and material histories of women.

In addition to providing more context and direction, the discussion of the tactile nature of the bones and their allusion to women’s collecting practices situated our understanding of the self in relation to larger (often gendered) movements in science and knowledge production in the Romantic period. Other units within the course help students grapple with some of the more abstract and intangible ideas of Romanticism, such as ephemerality and the complexity of the “individual genius.” The examples that follow in this essay illustrate the ways that the practice of studying Romanticism in a material context can help students engage meaningfully with these concepts.

The Shelleys, balloonomania, and collecting

The hot air balloon is a subject of interest in the writing of both Percy and Mary Shelley. For Percy’s 26th birthday, Mary even gave Percy a hand-stitched balloon and telescope they purchased together in Geneva (Fara 217). In Mary Shelley’s novel, The Last Man, set in the 21^st century, balloons serve as means of transportation. Early in the novel, the balloon represents the triumph of man over nature, as the protagonist sails effortlessly through the sky: “The machine obeyed the slightest motion of the helm; and, the wind blowing steadily, there was no let or obstacle to our course. Such was the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won” (55). However, as the story develops, the balloon becomes “frail” and “dares no longer sail on the agitated air” (181). The science that developed the balloons, like so many material manifestations of the ambitions of man, fails over time in the face of the power of the natural world.

Both Percy’s and Mary Shelley’s interest in and writing on balloons present us with a Romantic commentary upon the transcendence of the invention and its entanglement with the limitations of the ephemerally material. Their perspectives on the balloon in the Romantic imagination illustrate a way of thinking about the balloon’s materiality, its significance, its science, and its spectacle that correlates with the curating and collecting of “ballooning” in popular culture, particularly as can be seen in collections of balloon-related ephemera.

In my course, we study Mary Shelley’s The Last Man alongside Percy Shelley’s poem, “To a Balloon Laden with Knowledge,” as well as popularly collected objects related to ballooning. Examining the novel through a pedagogy of scrapbooking and collecting is an especially important method, as the work essentially begins with Mary Shelley’s character piecing together the story of the plague from a collection of sibylline leaves upon which it is written (see Brooker and Calè). We first look to a scrapbook held at the Huntington Library filled with newspaper clippings on the history of ballooning and on ballooning disasters (see fig. 1). This scrapbook, compiled in the 19^th century, includes sketches, handwritten notes, and pieces of balloons, souvenirs like those given to Percy by Mary Shelley. This scrapbook details a period in which the public was fascinated by the spectacle of the balloon, especially the ways that spectacle could quickly turn disastrous (which it often did).

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Fig. 1 "Collection of clippings. etc., relating to aviation: a scrapbook. 1780–1850," 139413, Aeronautica Collection: Prints and Ephemera, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Scrapbooking Keats, the individual genius, and the Romantic reconciling of contraries

If we consider, for instance, Keats’s work through the lens of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century women’s scrapbooks, we can better understand Keats’s concept of the “man of achievement” and the Romantic urge toward the reconciling of contraries (Letters 60). Through, first, study and then the creation of their own digital scrapbooks, students develop a working knowledge of Romantic reading and writing as a process and practice of the imagination. Our use of scrapbooking defines the imagination as connected to material culture and to the juxtapositions and collections and compositions of fragments of ephemeral information that define our view of the world and its possibilities. This process helps us to see similarities between the compositional structure of the scrapbook and Romantic poetry, and students formulate questions about the relationship between these products.

Scrapbooking as a practice brings disparate things together and creates a new context for information that supersedes the old or original context. As Ellen Gruber Garvey contends, scrapbooks allowed users to “save, manage, and reprocess information” (4). Scrapbooks were able to shape new and personal relationships to often historically and culturally impersonal events and figures. In a way, scrapbooks allowed the compiler to consume vast amounts of information, then digest and display that information in a manner reflective of personal taste and understanding. Lynch claims in “Paper Slips” that, similarly, “Founded on clipping, both literally and figuratively, al­bums are books that come together only as other books come apart” (89). Considering Keats’s written work alongside this process illustrates the material and constructed nature of the Romantic imagination, a subject examined in a recent issue of Studies in Romanticism, by Luisa Calè and Marianne Brooker. Starting with Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves, Calè and Brooker look to the “loose papers, detached leaves, and flighty scraps” that were part of Romantic collecting and that influenced the Romantic fragment (1). They ask, “What kind of Romanticism would emerge by tracing the temporary and ephemeral textual condition of the Sibyl’s leaves as an alternative to the stability of the author’s corpus?” (9). In my course, we work against the concept of authorial stability; we examine Keats’s deconstruction of literary hierarchies, as if he is pulling the books of the canon apart and re-making them into a new work reflective of his own poetic vision. Garvey argues that scrapbooks undercut the idea that Romantic writing was produced by an “individual genius” through the composition practice of engaging with multiple voices and perspectives and, ultimately, through writing with scissors: letting the many clippings be both the producer and product of the compiler/author’s voice (37). Much work on Keats reflects a similar sense of the dismantling of the “individual genius” in his poetry through his class background, his treatment of the canon, and the often-sensational content of his poetry. Discussion of Keats’s financial challenges helps students reflect on his background and poetry in relation to scrapbooks constructed by women, who were also not in positions of power. Keats’s engagement with and revision of the literary canon, his materialization of the imagination through his focus on sensation and consumption, and his poetic theory of negative capability all deconstruct the spaces and things held sacred by many writers, as well as common perceptions of the Romantic poet. In his writing, Keats brings together disparate categories through a process that demonstrates the materiality of fancy within the Romantic construct of the imagination. A number of the poems and concepts critical to Keats’s philosophy demonstrate a similarity between his process of poetic construction and that of scrapbooking; they also illustrate a connection to the scrapbooker’s mode of “writing with scissors,” as he pieces together conflicting ideas and material and sensory experiences to create a vision of the Romantic imagination.

Keats’s poems, “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” and “If by Dull Rhymes Our English Must be Chain’d,” demonstrate his re-working of poetry’s past, with its sacred spaces, figures, and ideals. It is his material re-imagination of these that creates an entirely new context and which connects his work to the process of “writing with scissors.” Through the poem, the Mermaid Tavern becomes a place of mythic proportions, of poetic inspiration worthy of the great poets of the past, present, and future. Historically, the Mermaid Tavern had been a meeting place for great writers like Ben Jonson and John Donne, so though Keats sets up the poem with a satirical tone, his historical placement of the location and his treatment of the Tavern ultimately deconstruct the sense of sacredness surrounding both poetic landscapes and poetic inspiration. Written in 1819, this poem can be seen as an example of Keats’s deconstruction and reconfiguration of these ideals, a process that recurs throughout his poetry. As scrapbookers take clippings often connected to “high culture” and art and personalize, combine, and re-imagine their meaning within the pages of the scrapbook, so Keats re-situates the poetic ideals represented by the Tavern through a process of cutting and pasting his own experiences and poetic philosophies into the poem. This process especially highlights the ways that the idealization of poetry is at odds with the popular, material ways through which knowledge was constructed and art and culture were mediated. If By Dull Rhymes” addresses a related problem of fettering poetry to strict structural ideals of the past. The poem’s traditional sonnet structure works in tension with its content’s critique of formal rigidity. In this poem, Keats not only advocates, as he does in “Mermaid Tavern,” a breaking with tradition, but he also advocates a new structural poetic practice similar to that of scrapbooking: considering the old and scientifically measuring and trimming it to better fit the goals of the present, of the poem at hand. In this way, he outlines a practice that involves almost a clipping away at traditional rhyme structures in order to place them in a new context and create a structure suited to each individual poem.

For the final section of my course on the Romantic movement, students consider the works of Keats alongside scrapbooks created by Fanny Brawne, Sarah Sophia Banks, and others. Brawne’s scrapbook (see fig. 2) depicts places she visited later in her life, as well as satirical prints, illustrations of theatrical players, pastoral scenes, and religious images. This scrapbook reveals aspects of Brawne’s later life and her interests; studying it helps us to think of her outside of the framework of her relationship with Keats. This is one of the scrapbooks we look to in order to understand how this form of composition responded to an explosion in printed materials and were a way for individuals, particularly women who did not have access to positions of power, to “tell their own stories with scissors” (Garvey 4; see also Taunton). Scrapbooking reflects how the expanding global sphere was perceived by and affected the individual (Garvey 4). As material objects formed from the tangible productions of surrounding culture and the imagination, scrapbooks help us to read history in a haptic manner that allows for the emergence of new experience through a practice of collecting that engages the body and the imagination in a material process of history-making characterized by heterogeneity and curiosity (Gernes 117). Additionally, students consider how the collecting of ephemera, mass-produced objects, takes part in a feminine knowledge that is built upon accumulation and preservation and plays a key role in curating and chronicling information (Catalani and Pearce 256).

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Fig. 2 Scrapbook of travel scenes, etc. which belonged to Fanny Brawne.” K/AR/01/014. Keats House Collections, London Metropolitan Archives. Image courtesy of Keats House, City of London.

The relationship of the material to the digital

The project that emerges from the discussion of scrapbooking and access to knowledge and power is both creative and critical. Students build a digital scrapbook of their own that highlights 1) a particular work from Romantic literature, 2) scholarly responses to that work, and 3) material objects and ephemera connected to some aspect of that work that can help us to better visualize and understand its broader social significance. Using one of the following digital platforms: Omeka, Google Docs/Slides, Wordpress, Weebly, or Wix, students are asked to illustrate the relationship between the objects, the scholarship, and the primary text they’ve selected in a creative way that supports their critical reading of those materials and that relationship.

This assignment integrates the examination of Romantic concepts and material culture and encourages students to employ a methodology, a “practice,” in their reading and scholarly work that reflects the heterogeneity and complexities of the Romantic period. Similar to scrapbook compilers from the Romantic period, students will materially compile, manipulate, and display their knowledge, then will critically reflect on that process and the argument that they are making through their project. The haptic and material nature of this project alters their understanding of an argument, helping them to see the ways that their own claims engage with and assemble knowledge from a multitude of sources. Additionally, this project shows students that the relationship between the digital and material is not that of binary opposition. So much of the conversation around the digital space revolves around what is “lost” through digitization or is simply focused on the access that digital space can provide. This assignment helps students to see the potential of the digital space to both engage with material culture in unique ways and to better engage with the process of learning through Romantic materiality. In the digital space, the collected and displayed pieces of knowledge that influence the various texts we study can be shared in a public way and can more clearly reflect the scrapbooking practices of Romantic and contemporary knowledge production.

While compiling these scrapbooks, students are going through a process that resembles the physical process of collecting materials, but they are doing it in an online environment/digital format that reflects today’s forms of information processing. As Susan Zieger points out, the burgeoning of print in the nineteenth century “established entwined affective, psychological, social, and cultural habits of media consumption that we still experience, even as pixels supersede paper” (3). The digital project serves multiple purposes at once—engaging students with materiality of a previous period while highlighting the relationship of the digital to the material and the ephemeral. As Shelley AJ Jones has demonstrated in her article, “Digital Experiments in Romantic Commonplace Books,” there is a strong connection between eighteenth-century print culture, nineteenth-century commonplace books, and technology today (see Gaillet; Jacobs; Pasupathi). Our online databases, information processors, and interfaces function to sort and process knowledge in similar ways to the commonplace books and scrapbooks of the Romantic era. As Garvey states, “Instead of reading a newspaper with shears and penknife in hand to clip articles of interest we read online news sources saved and organized by digitized place marking and cut-and-paste functions” (21–22). We don’t save these articles in a book in our home; we send them to friends via email, we post them to social media, or we paste them into a blog. My assignment builds on Garvey’s claims that the process of scrapbooking underlies our present ways of thinking about information and on Jones’s work, which focuses on information management and student ownership of knowledge. Beyond this, I also want students to think about the translation of the material to the digital and of the ways we can develop a scholarly writing practice that reflects the concerns of our subject and engages meaningfully with larger issues of Romanticism. Students’ digital scrapbooks display a concern especially for the process of reconciling contraries and dismantling hierarchies and fictions of the “individual genius” often associated with the Romantic poet. They employ a Keatsian outlook, resisting conclusions and considering conflicting possibilities.

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Fig. 3 Student digital scrapbook project, Ayden Thomas, “The Fragment of ‘Kubla Khan’: A Scrapbook of Coleridge’s Poetic Identity.”

Promoting diversity and equity

The study of material culture serves to promote diversity and equity within my classroom. As with the historical purpose of scrapbooking as a way for individuals to access positions of power and to reflect upon the effects of global culture on their individual lives, the study of material culture encourages students to develop a personal, working relationship with Romantic literature and culture. This process allows them to find voices that reflect their own, and to see how the concerns of the Romantic period resonate today, as they create and curate objects that illustrate foundational ideas about Romanticism as a cultural movement, imbued with social significance. This material approach to Romanticism, in particular, responds to recent work on the teaching global Romanticism (see Nielsen; Trumpener). Students engage with the digital scrapbooking project after reading Chander’s Brown Romantics. We consider Chander’s approach to Romanticism and attempt “to undo the logic of the exclusive inclusion, and to begin to acknowledge those participants within the republic of letters who have been excluded from the body of poetry that determines the laws of literature” (13). One way in which this attempt is made is through the turn to material culture, to objects preserved, collected, and circulated that, when compiled and arranged, can tell stories and give us glimpses into the lives and work of figures in the Romantic period and subjects that the canon has failed to acknowledge.

For instance, one student’s scrapbook assignment examined connections between sugarcane, the slave trade, and William Blake’s illustrations for the Songs of Innocence and Experience (fig. 4) (see Gallant). Another student’s project connected their scrapbook specifically to larger themes of global Romanticism, building pages that linked images from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” with Buddhist philosophy (fig. 5) (see Yang). These students were able to use the material objects illustrated in the pages of their digital scrapbooks to connect William Blake’s illustrations and Keats’s poem to underrepresented groups and to expand the discussion of these traditionally British works to other cultures and backgrounds and histories of oppression.

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Fig. 4 Student digital scrapbook project, Guenevere Ford, “Blake and Romanticism: The Connection which Make Us Human.”

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Fig. 5 Student digital scrapbook project, Ren Parks, “John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’—A Scrapbook.”

This assignment gives students the opportunity to juxtapose these diverse cultural objects in a scrapbook or digital format connecting them from the old to the new. The notion of the historical changes for students through creating these scrapbooks. Beyond creating a parallel history, they are able to uncover relationships that they might not have otherwise seen. Students were able to approach this assignment from a variety of angles: individual interest, prior knowledge, and both formal and symbolic properties. In creating their digital scrapbooks, they critically and creatively examined the Romantic movement from diverse, global perspectives and accessed unique interpretations of texts through the collection, study, and juxtaposition of material objects.

The material objects used by the author and experienced by the reader, the actual page of the work, as well as the materials circulating in the culture surrounding the work, are imbued with significance on a personal level, as with Fanny Brawne’s engagement ring, and on a societal level, as with the ballooning ephemera. Without this material practice at the center of our study of Romanticism we are in danger of missing context and meaning or replacing them with modern schemas that tell us more about our own culture than that of the Romantic movement. Yet, by using material culture as a bridge, students can find points of connection without losing the essential historical context, they can develop meaningful avenues for original research, and they can access alternative modes for thinking about Romantic authorship and the literary canon.

Acknowledgements:

With gratitude, I would like to acknowledge that the research into ballooning scrapbooks referenced in this article was made possible by the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant. Thank you, also, to my research assistant, Mallory Martin, and to my students, Guenevere Ford, Ren Parks, and Ayden Thomas for letting me reference their wonderful projects.