ABSTRACT
Some of the traditional functions of the commonplace book, which, as Dalloway’s self-deprecating comments recall, had served fundamentally as an aid to memory and learning, seemed to have continued much as before. Thus materials for sermons, reflections on scripture and copies of lectures and speeches remained important components of many readers’ notes. Meditative commonplacing encouraged by religious devotion, however, sometimes showed clear signs of catching the philosophical mood of an age of Enlightenment. Indeed, it was often capable of embracing the fashionable idioms promoted to readers through popularising accounts of technical questions such as the ‘moral sense’. Commonplacing, as we have seen, took a great variety of forms. Certainly to conceptualise it as merely a passive response, and thus by implication as essentially unilluminating about the underlying experience of reading, would be a grave mistake. The opportunities that commonplacing gave to develop a range of more complicated responses to what had been read should also not be overlooked.
