Harriet Gould's Book: Description and Provenance

* * *

Let me begin at the beginning, on March 18,1837, when a woman named Lois Gould gave her new sister-in-law, Harriet Lazell Gould, a book of blank pages bound in cardboard covered with ornamental, marbled paper and an embossed leather spine. Similar books were used for diaries, recipe books, housekeeping records, or household accounts, but Lois Gould seemed to have a specific use in mind. In a large, bold hand she titled it "Harriet Gould's Book, Dover, Vermont, March 18th, 1837" and went on to write the inscription that serves as an epigraph to this part of the present study. It is this inscription that transforms the limitless potential of the blank book into what it is: a keepsake album filled with verbal "remembrances." More important, the inscription provides directions for when, how, and why the book should be used. If it had been slightly later in the century and if Lois had been slightly better off financially, Harriet might have been given an album printed especially for a keepsake with engravings and gilt. But as it was, Harriet and her friends did turn the pages of this ordinary book to the extraordinary use of remembering. Together they wrote down forty different poems as "fond remembrances" of themselves. Almost every page of the album is written on, and eight additional poems were kept in an envelope between the cover and the pages of the book. The poems that are dated do not follow in chronological order—the majority of the poems are from the late 1830s and 1840s—and the dated entries suggest the album was more or less active through the early 1860s. Writers apparently chose the placement of their contributions with some degree of care, just as they used obvious care in their handwriting. Few of the texts have scratch-outs or corrections — all seem to be "clean" copies. All of the verse is didactic; all of it is to some degree influenced by the influx of British and Continental Romantic verse that was beginning to be featured in the Poetry columns of the local papers. The subjects of the poems in the album range from political and religious credos, to elegies on friends and ministers, to meditations on death. All of the poems touch on loss. All of the poems are gifts.

The provenance and contents of Harriet Gould's Book prove it to be, in many ways, typical. From the period of the early republic through the Reconstruction era it was common for a woman or girl (less frequently a man or boy) to keep such an album. The owner of the album would ask her friends to write in it and they would respond in one of the following ways: (i) copy something composed by someone else and attribute it to that person, (2) write something original, or (3) alter a poem composed by someone else to fit the present circumstances better. Sometimes the owner would do all the actual writing in her own hand; but usually albums contain evidence of several autographs. Often the owner would also write her own favorites in her album. Less frequently, the owner would fill the album with extracts or verses chosen solely by and for herself. Harriet Gould's Book is consistent with this description, but in other ways, this manuscript is atypical and therefore of more interest than many other examples. For one thing, the degree of its completion— almost every page is written on—shows that Harriet Gould apparently kept up her interest in the practice over the course of several decades as she matured from bride to widow. Many similar examples bespeak an initial enthusiasm that fails to be maintained. Second, it is part of a rich collection of associated items — diaries, other albums, hair-remembrancers, weavings, genealogies —owned by related individuals and providing an unusually deep context for unraveling the various personal relationships of the writers.

As can be seen by leafing through the appendixes, where these poems are transcribed, Harriet herself was a significant contributor to her own book. Following the directions embodied in Lois's epigraph, Harriet copied favorite poems and experimented with original verse as a means of memorializing her own losses as they occurred. Her contributions testify to (as they supplement) the memorializing power of the "remembrances" written by others. The other writers in the Book lived in the town of Dover or nearby; most, like Harriet and her husband, John, belonged to the Baptist church. Many were related, either by blood or marriage, to Harriet. Whether written by others or by herself, these remembrances exhibit a high degree of Intertextuality. They talk to each other, quoting each other or appropriating and redeploying lines, fragments, images, from shared sources. They talk with each other, to the extent that the manuscript as a whole seems the product of a corporate author despite the signatures that mark the writers of some, though not all, of the pieces. Though the products of numerous separate writers, these poems bespeak an effort to work together on the common projects of their lives. It is for this reason that I have come to understand the main function of Sentimentality to be collaboration.

Although Harriet Gould wrote in her own album, Harriet Gould's Book itself is a composite created by many authors whose works are unified under her direction. Harriet, as owner, is both author and compiler, not unlike the medieval owners of manuscripts. As an artifact, the album seems to have circulated to some degree after the death of Harriet Gould and then to have come into the possession of the Howes of Wilmington, Vermont, through Harriet's sister-in-law Abigail Gould Howe. Family lore has it that the Book had been transferred to Eva Parmelee Howe on the occasion of the death of her four-year-old son in the 1920s, then later came into the possession of Florence Fox Howe before being given to its present owners, Ralph and Verne Howe. (With the collection is a much later example kept by Florence Fox Howe at the turn of the last century and a later example kept by...