5. Tracing Selfies to the Edwardian Bookplate

On Facebook, users express, explore and experiment with their identity through selfies – a self-portrait digital photograph typically taken by holding a camera or phone in one’s own hand. Selfies are often considered to be a product of the contemporary age, aided by advances in photography, media fixation and a growing obsession with self-presentation. However, an exploration of Edwardian pictorial bookplates can help us reframe the supposed novelty of modern-day selfies.

Pictorial bookplates can be approached as manifestations of a rehearsed and stable self, which is consciously produced to construct a durable self-image (Georgakopoulou, 2016, p. 306). Like modern-day selfies, they were powerful, portable and semi-public sites of self-fashioning that enabled their owners to use a range of semiotic and material resources to tell a story to others about their lives. Pictorial bookplates first emerged in the late 19th century when bookplate ownership trickled down to the middle classes thanks to the introduction of in-house bookplate design in bookshops and stationers. Prior to this, bookplates had been predominantly armorial, exclusively owned by members of the upper classes who had coats of arms. With no official claim to armorials, the middle classes began to experiment with pictorial designs that revealed information about their hobbies, professions and educational backgrounds. By the Edwardian era, ‘pictorial fever’ had spread across the country, with book owners employing artists to present themselves in a particular way.

Like selfies, pictorial bookplates received constant criticism regarding their authenticity, simplicity and superficiality. Koch (1915, p. 7) saw their owners as vain and obsessed with ostentation, while Price (1912, p. 143) was suspicious of the “ill-chosen ideas rendered with distinctly uncertain talent.” Dennis (1902, p. 136-37) went further, describing the bookplates as “abominations” that could be “designed by amateurs without any qualifications,” thus making them “worthless in design, badly reproduced, vilely printed [and] bringing the old custom into general disrepute.” For Hamilton (1895, p. 44), they were only suitable “for the amusement of youngsters in the nursery,” while Hardy (1893) considered an old warming pan to be a “more enviable piece of portable property” than the pictorial bookplate.

Despite these criticisms, many praised pictorial bookplates for being empowering acts of self-representation and self-expression that revealed the inner soul and life history of their owners. Similar arguments have been put forward by selfie advocates today (e.g. Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017; Page, 2019). As Allen (cited in Koch, 1915, p. 19-20) notes, at one glance, a pictorial bookplate revealed that its owner “glorifies in golf, has a regard for roses, rides a wheel, esteems Omar Khayyam very highly, reads Scott and Lowell, can quote Shakespeare, has been to Switzerland, collects butterflies and lives in New Jersey.” Comparable information can be obtained from a user’s social media profile.

A recent survey conducted by the Florida House Experience (2017) has shown that users tend to take between two and five selfies before uploading their chosen image to social media. Equally, bookplate users created several prototypes before deciding on the final version to paste in their books. As Bowdain (1917, p. 212) explains, the bookplate artist worked strictly under instructions and his creations required the owner’s full approval and acceptance. In an attempt to guide users on this new practice, articles and advice manuals started to be produced with instructions on how to create the best pictorial bookplates.

Koch (1915, p. 18-19) set out eight key points in his Concerning Book Plates:

1. Do not try to rival a poster or a book-wrapper or ornate endpapers

2. Do not be much larger than 2 to 3 inches

3. Be small enough to go easily on the inside of the cover of any volume without crowding

4. Do not use too thick a paper because it is too difficult to paste down; use Japan vellum or plate paper preferably

5. Do not have the plates gummed

6. Clearly draw the name and do not run in on the bias nor in any fanciful way

7. Make sure the motif is appropriate to the general run of books the plate is to adorn

8. Avoid humorous plates

Likewise, internet magazines post regular guidance on the do’s and don’ts of selfie-taking:

• https://spectrum-brand.com/blogs/news/how-to-take-the-perfect-instagram-selfie-dos-donts

• https://theladylovescouture.com/selfie-etiquette-the-dos-and-donts-of-the-selfie/

• https://therootcollective.com/blogs/news/11-basic-dos-and-donts-to-selfies

So, let’s take a look at a few examples.

These are the bookplates of husband and wife Harold and Calypso Chapin – a famous acting duo in Edwardian Britain. In 1911, Harold obtained the role of the harlequin in J.M. Barrie’s Pantaloon at the Royalty Theatre, Glasgow. In order to celebrate this coveted role, he commissioned the artist Sidney Lewis Ransom to design this self-portrait and, thus, announce his new job to the world. Harold’s costume is now held at the V&A Museum along with a letter from his wife Calypso who wrote that, although the harlequin costume was not made for her husband, “he liked it so much he decided to buy it.” Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Harold enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corp and was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Widely regarded as one of the greatest potential dramatic talents to be lost in the War, Harold became immortalised as the harlequin, which served as a lasting symbol of his talent.

Playing with her own first name, Calypso Chapin has used her bookplate to represent herself as the nymph Calypso who entices Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. In the image, Chapin’s bowed head, closed eyes and turned body act as a bold display of sexualisation, which is further accentuated by her naked body, sandaled feet, headpiece and bosom-like cymbals. Her position on a plinth turns her into a statue, further emphasising her as an object of contemplation. As Fletcher (2013, p. 101) explains, images of nymphs unsettled Edwardians because the intense realism of their bodies and unabashed eroticism of their poses sat uneasily with their classical references. However, while the nymph was widely associated with the ‘femme fatale’ archetype, it was also seen as the personification of natural creation. Adorno and Horkheimer (2016, p. 58) note that the character of Calypso in particular appealed to bourgeois women because she represented power over one’s own fate. Thus, through Chapin’s ‘imagined’ selfie, she is able to employ a jocular rebus, while simultaneously expressing her sexuality in an empowering way that connected her to the beauty and power of the natural world.

The bookplate below belonged to headmistress Edith Bessie Cook from Leeds, Yorkshire. Through her selfie, Cook projects a lot of information about her desired social status; a status from which she was excluded being a member of the lower-middle classes. Alongside Cook’s self-portrait, we see decorative furnishings, such as a William Morris armchair, a solid wooden dresser and wooden sideboards, as well as a pre-Raphaelite painting on the back wall – all of which serve as deliberate displays of wealth. The image of Cook herself is the epitome of a ‘Gibson Girl’ – a pen and ink illustration of the Edwardian feminine ideal of beauty. Known for her high-neck bodice, pouched dress and pompadour hairstyle, these features are reflected in Cook’s selfie. Cook’s engrossment in her book rather than staring at the viewer emphasises her as an object to be stared at and is tied up with notions of sensual pleasure and secret intimacy. In real life, Cook is unlikely to have been able to afford such lavish furnishings. Equally, photographs of Cook show that she was not as aesthetically beautiful as she appears in her bookplate, indicating how, even in the Edwardian age, people were able to manipulate images in order to present themselves more favourably.

In both the contemporary selfie and Edwardian bookplate, we see opportunities for individuals to heavily edit and manage their appearance in order to gain approval from others and even produce an emulative desire in the audience. However, to pass the acts off as merely narcissistic is to ignore their complexity as routines of both self-promotion and self-disclosure. Yes, in many cases, selfies are strategic performances designed to promote an idealised version of self, but they can also reveal a person’s struggle to balance vulnerability with authenticity in an attempt to gain empowerment and control over their own image and identity. If you are interested in learning more about this, stay tuned for my forthcoming publication with Dr Tereza Spilioti on celebrity self-styling in selfies and Edwardian bookplates.

References:

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. 2016. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso Books.

Bowdain, W.G. 1917. Some notes on book-plates and on collecting them, The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 4(4), pp. 211-220.

Dennis, G R. 1902. Mr Anning Bell’s Recent Bookplates, Artist: an illustrated monthly record of arts, crafts and industries 33 (Jan ed.), pp. 136-141.

Diefenbach, S. and Christoforakos, L. 2017. The Selfie Paradox: Nobody Seems to Like Them Yet Everyone Has Reasons to Take Them. An Exploration of Psychological Functions of Selfies in Self-Presentation, Frontiers in Psychology, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00007/full

Fletcher, P. 2013. “Victorians and Moderns,” in Trumble, A. and Wolk Rager, A. eds. Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, pp. 99-109.

Florida Health Experience, 2017. #bodypositive: A look at body image and social media, Available at https://fherehab.com/news/bodypositive/,

Georgakopoulou, A. 2016. From Narrating the Self to Posting Self(Ies): A Small Stories Approach to Selfies, Open Linguistics, 2, pp. 300-317.

Hamilton, W. 1895. Dated Book-Plates, A & C Black.

Hardy, W. 1897. Bookplates, Library of Alexandria.

Koch, T. 1915. Concerning Book Plates, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 9(1/2), pp. 3-20.

Page, R. 2019. Self-denigration and the mixed messages of ‘ugly’ selfies on Instagram, Internet Pragmatics 2(2), pp. 175-202.

Price, C. 1912. On the Design of Book-plates: An Exposition of Some General Theories of Motive, Arts & Decoration (1910-1818) 2(4), pp. 142-44.