6. Performing Identity in Edwardian Book Inscriptions

In last week’s post, I discussed the ways in which Edwardian pictorial bookplates served similar functions to contemporary selfies in their projections of idealised versions of owners. This week, I want to explore this idea of ‘performing identity’ further by looking at different examples of inscriptions and how their combination of semiotic and material resources offered unprecedented opportunities for owners to embellish their own lives and experiences for their consumption by others. Identity performance is something that comes up time and time again in studies of social media. Uimonen (2013), for example, argues that relationships on Facebook are increasingly indexed through images, showing how users actively engage in the social construction of reality. Equally, Zhao et al. (2008) claim that Facebook users carry out implicit identity displays, using the power of visuals to “show rather than tell” others about themselves. Similar factors are at work in Edwardian book inscriptions.

Let’s start with the armorial bookplate below. On the surface, this looks like the typical coat of arms that we would expect in the bookplate of a male upper-class book owner, except its owner is, in fact, a female domestic servant: Maude Goff. The Edwardian bookplate market saw a flood of ‘fake armorials’ as stationers, who were more concerned with making profit than upholding tradition, made no effort to ensure that the customer was legally entitled to bear arms or that the heraldry used was accurate. This led many members of the lower- and upper-middle classes to capitalise on this ambiguity and design their own armorials that bestowed them with a status much higher than their own.

According to the rules of heraldry, women with legitimate claims to coats of arms could not use crests and their shields had to be diamond-shaped. Goff’s bookplate flouts both conventions, showing her lack of knowledge of heraldic customs. Furthermore, the crest itself is not a real heraldic crest, the red squirrel chosen as a clever play on the fact that “Goff” means someone with red hair. Equally, divided shields typically showed the husband and wife’s lineage. However, on this bookplate, the left design is appropriated from Lionel Trevor Goff, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Artillery, and no relation to Maude, while the right is an eclectic assortment of arbitrary tinctures and symbols. Knowing this, there is a certain irony in the motto “fier sans tache” (flawlessly proud), which boldly suggests that Goff has nothing to hide.

We see similar examples of social posturing in book inscriptions written in foreign languages. This gift inscription was written in English, Persian and Latin by the jurist Frederick Pollock to the Liberal politician Sydney Waterlow. The Persian and Latin quote the same line taken from a poem by the Iranian scholar Rumi: “Man of God ‘Shams of Tabriz’ is beyond piety and infidelity.” However, as with most multilingual inscriptions, they have been inaccurately reproduced. In a letter sent to fellow jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes on October 8, 1908 (cited in de Wolfe Howe, 1961, p. 142), Frederick reuses the same incorrect Persian quote, suggesting that Pollock used foreign languages to appear more scholarly or educated than he actually was. In most cases, Pollock’s performance was probably successful as it depended on his recipient not having a knowledge of the language in question.

Some wealthy book owners used images of their houses and furnishings to display a positive self-image to the outside world. Take this example belonging to the industrialist John William Watson, which shows his house, Adderstone Hall. Here, Watson’s house is the central focus of the image, but it is located at the furthermost point, poking out mystically amongst the trees at the end of a long path and barred off by gates. This perspective serves to indicate that the house is out of reach and unable to be accessed by those who do not have the right connections (Harrison, 2003, p. 48). Wolk-Rager (2013, p. 43) describes these sorts of images as being at “the point where flesh and blood dissolve into a fantasy of gaze” because they tantalise viewers by only revealing so much. The open book in the foreground of Watson’s image – Dorothy Forster by Walter Besant – is a subtle reference to the Forsters, who were the original owners of Adderstone Hall, but had to sell the house to the Watson family when they went bankrupt in the early 18th century. Thus, the book acts as a symbol of disparagement and ridicule, further emphasised by the juxtaposition of Watson’s own coat of arms and the motto “hic habitabo quia hic felicitas mea” (here is where my happiness dwells).

Some identity performances depended on viewers possessing the correct sociocultural knowledge to interpret the act correctly. A case in point is the bookplate below belonging to Bertha Johnson, Principal of the Association of Home Students at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. The image and quote come from John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies and serve to equate Johnson with a high social status by rejecting any association with the labouring classes. This is done subtly through the lines “His eternal court is open to you” and “You may talk with Kings and Queens,” which sound relatively neutral on the surface, yet become ladened with impartiality if the reader knows the preceding lines: “Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stableboy when…” and “jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entrée here, and audience there, when all this while…”

Thompson and Collins (2020, p. 321) describe handwritten text as being the most embodied kind of writing as users are able to play upon the performative qualities of weight, slope, curvature, expansion, connectivity, orientation and regularity to make meaning (van Leeuwen, 2006). We see this particularly in gift inscriptions as inscribers were concerned with projecting a positive self-image to the recipient. The example below was written by Herbert A. Prince, a 44-year-old insurance clerk from Sutton and given to Ellen Holman, a 52-year-old housewife, also from Sutton. Holman looked after Prince during a period of illness and he gave her the book as a thank you present. The first part of Prince’s inscription shows an ornate gothic script, which is clearly not his everyday handwriting (as indicated by his 1911 census return). It is likely that Prince deliberately chose this lettering because of its aesthetic appeal. Equally, the second part of the inscription is not in Prince’s normal hand, instead boasting a humanist miniscule style associated with intelligence, the revival of antiquity and beauty. Again, Prince may have employed this handwriting style to promote an image of himself as someone who is well-educated. Projecting a high level of education and respectability was particularly important for Prince as he was a member of the emerging lower-middle classes, while Holman belonged to the well-established upper-middle classes.

This brief overview has highlighted some of the ways that Edwardians used their inscriptions to perform identity, whether through the use of armorials, foreign languages, images of houses, quotes or handwriting. These visual displays, of course, went in tandem with more verbal displays of status, such as terms of address (e.g. Sir, Dame, Prince) and hierarchical ordering of information (i.e., Father, Mother, Eldest Child, Youngest Child). While the modes of presentation may have changed, there is a clear continuity between these practices and contemporary practices on social media. Today, users perform their identity by sharing images of clothing, shoes or other personal possessions, liking or following particular brands or celebrities, tagging themselves in certain locations, writing reviews and recommendations for restaurants or films or including links to JustGiving pages or online petitions. These similarities embed the impulse to perform identity in a sociohistorical context and reveal that this is not a new or innovative practice but rather an innate human compulsion.

References:

de Wolfe Howe, M. 1961. Holmes-Pollock Letters: the correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932, Volume 1, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Harrison, C. 2003. Visual Social Semiotics: how still images make meaning, Technical Communication 50(1), pp. 46-60.

Thompson, R. and Collins, M. 2020. Disruptive practice: Multimodality, innovation and standardisation from the medieval to the digital text, In: Tagg, C. and Evans, M., Message and Medium: English Language Practices Across Old and New Media, de Gruyter, pp.281-305.

Uimonen, P. 2013. Visual Identity in Facebook, Visual Studies 28(2), pp. 122-35.

van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Towards a semiotics of typography, Information Design Journal 14(2), pp. 139-55.

Wolk-Rager, A. 2013. The Glittering World: Spectacle, Luxury, and Desire in the Edwardian Age, In: Trumble, A. and Wolk-Rager, A. (eds), Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, pp. 39-57.

Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S. and Martin, J. 2008. Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital Empowerment in Anchored Relationships, Computers in Human Behavior 24(5), pp. 1816-36.