3. Clean-Copy Challenges, Victorian Style!

For those of you old enough to remember when MySpace and Bebo were the most popular social media platforms, you may recall clean-copy challenges – a list of questions that users posted to their page, completed and then asked friends to fill in. While these challenges are not as popular as they once were, similar surveys, quizzes and games still appear from time to time on Facebook, offering opportunities for friends to develop their social bond by learning more about each other. However, what many do not stop to realise is that, in taking part in these challenges, they are, in fact, replicating a centuries-old practice.

The confession book first emerged in the 1860s and boasted lists of pre-printed questions that the owner was encouraged to answer and then pass around amongst his/her family members and friends with the aim of building a comprehensive guide to their likes, dislikes, habits and traits. All entries were marked with a signature as a seal of authenticity. Matthews (2000) describes the confession book as a “psychological Crystal Palace” because it had the power to reveal someone’s inner-most thoughts. Like the birthday book I explored in last week’s post, the confession book was aimed largely at the middle classes who had the necessary disposable income, leisure time and social circles to participate in such activities.

In the Victorian and Edwardian era, there were concerns that certain personal revelations would have dangerous consequences, especially for women who were expected to behave in a particular manner. While Facebook offers users a certain element of control in terms of who can access their page and see their statuses, users of the confession book did not have that luxury. Of course, the genre dictated that their friends would see their answers and many were aware of this, but what perhaps caused more unease was the nosy servant who might spread idle gossip. As one anxious woman stated:

"It would be most mortifying if one absent-mindedly left the precious volume lying about, to read by ribald brothers or sniggering servant-maids. One can imagine the enthusiast waking up in the middle of the night and leaping from her troubled couch with half a scream – “Did I or did I not lock my confession book? Goodness! If I have not, the servant will find it when she comes down in the morning, and will neglect he grates while she reads it, cover to cover. If I go downstairs, I may meet burglars. But if I don’t… Ah, that servant; I’ll risk the burglars!”

So, just as now, privacy and who had access to a person’s data was a major worry for many users of the confession book. In her exploration of Facebook practices, Raynes-Goldie (2010) found that users tried to protect their social privacy primarily through the use of an alias to make it difficult for people to identify them. Similarly, many people who wrote in confession books tried to disguise their identities through fake names – “Old Brer Rabbit”, “The Amateur Photographer,” “Master,” “Peter Blobbs” – or even responded sarcastically to the prompt “Give your name” with the “Have not done with it, so cannot subscribe.” Here, we see a clear tension through the initial aim of the confession book in encouraging truthfulness amongst friends and the actual responses of users who felt uncomfortable with their lives being under scrutiny.

On Facebook and in confession books, however, these aliases only offered so much protection. Participating in a clean-copy challenge automatically reveals the person’s identity as it is posted directly onto his/her profile signalling a direct link, while the personal and intimate nature of handwriting in a confession book often betrayed a person’s real identity through its performative nature and the book owner’s familiarity with his/her scrawl.

Because of these concerns regarding privacy, many users subverted the original purpose of the confession book as a serious writing practice that enabled friends to share secrets, memories and thoughts with one another, instead taking part in acts of “self-censorship” (Matthews, 2000) to avoid providing real answers. These ranged from evasive tactics, jocular or cynical remarks, copying the answers of others, using well-known quotes or sayings, inscribing refusals or leaving fields blank. A newspaper article of the time notes that two frequently reoccurring evasion practices were to use the common ‘stock phrase’ “Don’t b#, don’t b♭, b♮” or stick a halfpenny stamp onto the page with the words “I’m stuck” alongside. Similar self-censorship strategies are also employed by users of clean-copy challenges on Facebook. Note the similarities between the two entries below written 140 years apart:

Victorian Confession Book Favourite flower: Cauliflower

My greatest happiness: Assaulting the police

My favourite animal: A rocking horse

My present state of mind: Never mind!

Favourite composer and instrument: A glass of hot punch and a ladle

Facebook Clean-Copy Challenge

First concert? Now that would be telling

Last time you cried? No comment

Tea or coffee? Depends

Red or white wine? Yuck!

Do you like music? If music be the food of love, play on

These evasion tactics became common knowledge amongst the middle classes of ordinary society, particularly amongst men. They became so widely dispersed and culturally embedded in Victorian society that they were mimicked in literature of the time. The male protagonist in the 1889 short story ‘The Story of a Confession Album’ by Aubrey Beardsley admits “I had tried to be very funny and had written without a particle of truth” in his confession book. Equally, a tale in Newspaper told of a man who was wooing two women, Lucinda and Lucasta. When he received their confession books, he deliberately tailored his answers to appeal to each woman: e.g. what is your favourite name? Lucinda/Lucasta; what art attracts you most? Painting as you paint (Lucinda), music when you sing (Lucasta). However, on returning the books, he realised that he accidentally wrote the answers in the wrong copies. The story ends with him losing both women, showing the perils of not writing truthfully in the confession book.

In clean-copy challenges and confession books, other users chose instead to socially posture and write answers that made/make them seem smarter than they are/were. Authenticity was and remains a common concern for people taking part in these types of literacy practices and there is a constant tension between wanting to tell the truth and presenting a more interesting or idealised version of oneself, knowing that it will be shared in a semi-public medium. However, to suggest that everybody used humour, evasion or social posturing to deliberately deceive the owner would be oversimplistic. In many cases, it was simply that the person felt that they led uninteresting lives or had nothing to say on a particular topic. As one newspaper journalist put it, “[Some people] really have not got any favourite mottoes and heroes and authors and could no more say off-hand what manly virtue they admire most than direct an inquirer to the South Pole.” This social pressure to fill in the confession book provoked great anxiety in some inscribers, as newspaper reports of the time tell us:

“You were taken unawares, a pot of ink was dabbed down in front of you and a pen thrust into your hand and you were told, without any preparation, to dissect your soul for the benefit of the world at large.”

“People waylay their acquaintances and make them fill up the lists as if these were insurance forms or census papers.”

“People kick against being cross-examined by a little bit of an inch thickness of bound leaves.”

Facebook users have noticed similar social pressures when friends post statuses with lines like “I bet only my real friends will repost this,” stating that it causes considerable stress to manage such content (Fox and Moreland, 2015). Such is people’s disdain that there is even a Facebook group called “I fucking hate ‘copy and paste’ pleas.” However, Facebook users have a better chance of evading and avoiding a face-threatening act by simply ignoring the post. Victorians could not escape the confession book as it would travel with the owner and be presented to them in a social situation, often with a pen. To refuse would be considered highly disrespectful.

Another social pressure for users of the confession book centred around the possibility of making mistakes that would be unable to be edited and would be left as evidence of their perceived lack of intelligence or respectability. As one concerned woman lamented:

“I am conscious that away up in the North there may be in existence a confession book in which I said that my favourite occupation was ‘bying’ new clothes. Probably only friends point me out and say, ‘She never could spell.’ I have never been able to erase that blot of spelling in that confession book from my mind. Whenever I hear or think of this particular form of torture, I always think of that one slip of spelling.”

While Facebook grants users the ability to edit posts, a small label appears next to the post stating that it has been edited, which reveals what they have done. Nonetheless, at least Facebook owners have the possibility of deleting posts permanently from their account if they wish to do so at a later date. Once confession book users wrote their entry, it no longer belonged to them and was put out in the world and under the trust of the book owner.

This brief overview has demonstrated that confession books and clean-copy challenges are supposed to be intimate, personal ways of recording social and domestic relationships and constructing a consciously revealing self-portrait to family and friends. However, aware of the platforms’ semi-public nature and potential for criticism, most people, in fact, subvert the genre, going against accepted norms by lying, evading, appropriating or social posturing, or find clever ways to gain some form of control over it.

References:

Beardsley, A. 1889. The Story of a Confession Album, Tit Bits 429, 4 January, https://www.cypherpress.com/content/beardsley/juvenilia/confession.php

Fox, J. and Moreland, J. 2015. The Dark Side of Social Networking Sites: An exploration of the relational and psychological stressors associated with Facebook use and affordances, Computers in Human Behavior 45, pp. 168-76.

Matthews, S. 2000. Psychological Crystal Palace? Late Victorian Confession Albums, Book History 3, pp. 125-54.

Raynes-Goldie, K. 2010. Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook, First Monday 15(1), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775/2432

Newspaper Articles (all from www.britishnewspaperarchive.com):

Confession Album, Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser, 25 June 1909.

Confession Books, Rugby Advertiser, 8 October 1901.

Confession Books, Exmouth Journal, 12 October 1901.

Confession Books, Bolton Evening News, 10 September 1904.

Lucinda and Lucasta, Cannock Chase Courier, 7 October 1899.

The Autograph Book, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 6 November 1929.