Research Catalyst

Occasionally, the archive at Edge Hill contains items that we don’t know much about. One of these is a Victorian scrapbook. Unfortunately, whether it was created by a student at Edge hill or donated we do not know. Keeping a scrapbook was very popular during the Victorian era, especially for children and women. Companies produced stamps that could be bought especially for use in for scrapbooks. It was a flexible way of being creative, learning and making something to preserve for the future. Victorians could stick anything into a book with blank pages to make it attractive and/or paste in things that had sentimental value including items, like tickets to events, that held positive memories, or poems and sayings. In other words, scraps of things that were important in some way. Later the word scrapbook was used in relation to programmes on the radio or TV that collected together reviews or interesting pieces of entertainment or humour.

Scrapbooks can tell us about the time in which they were constructed as they included, for example, domestic or work scenes, pictures about contemporary rhymes or fairy stories and about seasonal practices like putting up a Christmas tree and decorations.