These scribbles tell a story

In the margins of books, the past comes alive.

Heather Jackson is, officially, a professor of English at U of T. But in practice she is really a literary archaeologist.

Her excavations are in rare book libraries as opposed to African river beds and the artifacts she finds are notes scribbled in the margins of books. What she takes from her examination of these notations can be as telling about human nature and what-happened-when as a 35,000-year-old arrowhead.

The formal term for the scribbles Jackson analyzes is “marginalia.” “Today,” she says, “making notes in books is generally disapproved of, but it was actually encouraged in times past as part of the educational process.” The practice involved into a way people communicated with each other about what they had read in a book or expressed thoughts that the book had inspired.

While Jackson says the the annotation of manuscripts and books has existed for thousands of years in both Eastern and Western cultures, the late 18th/early 19th century poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the key figure responsible for popularizing marginalia. In her book on the subject, Marginalia: Readers Writers in Books, Jackson writes, “His friends… encouraged his habit of writing comments in the margins of books. They lent him their books to comment on.”

It was Coleridge’s marginalia that inspired Jackson to look further into the subject. She found that while certain high-profile writers — William Blake and Charles Darwin, for example — are well-known as writers of marginalia, a more broad analysis of marginalia as a social phenomenon could only be achieved by examining the work of unknown writers as well.

This has been the focus of Jackson’s research for the past five years. Her work has found an enthusiastic audience — the National Book Critics Circle in the U.S., for example, honoured her book by nominating it for one of the most prestigious literary prizes, a National Book Award, in 2002. Her research for the book was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and U of T’s Connaught Fund.

Jackson notes that while the practice of writing marginalia in books began to decline in the mid-1800s, there are still interesting examples from more recent times. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned at Robben Island in South Africa, copies of Shakespeare were circulated secretly among prisoners. The custom was for them to sign their names at their favourite passages. In 1977, Mandela wrote his name next to “Cowards die many times before their deaths” in Julius Caesar. And a copy of  The Little Engine That Could, containing what were said to be notations made by Marilyn Monroe, created a stir when her personal effects went on sale in 1999.

What has Jackson learned from her research? “Marginalia reveal the emotional investment people have made in their books. These very personal comments tell us how people interpreted what they read in books of all kinds and can inform us about popular opinion at various points in history.”