Reviews of Books

A culture is its stock of stories. Or so one may say with heuristic hyperbole. Being acculturated, then, consists in "knowing" the stories--how to tell them, how to follow them when they are told--and most of all in understanding, consciously or unconsciously, how to project story sequences forward into actions.	1
The very conventional genre of the commonplace book is one kind of document historians and literary scholars can use to gain insight into the stories that persons of a past age took pains to collect from their reading. Members of the William Byrd editorial team have tracked down fifty or so seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language manuscripts of this genre on both sides of the Atlantic. But only two such gentleman's commonplace books are known to have been published in their entirety with appropriate scholarly annotation. Both are from colonial British North America; both were kept by Virginians--William Byrd II and Thomas Jefferson. When they are compared, these two assemblages become markers of changes in the high culture of the North Atlantic world.	2
The commonplace book of William Byrd is the only survivor of a number of such volumes kept by him. It gives a very revealing glimpse of the stories that in the 1720s a colonial gentleman of cosmopolitan inclinations chose to assemble for his use and enjoyment. Kevin Berland (a literary scholar), Jan Kirsten Gilliam (a curator), and Kenneth A. Lockridge (a historian) have done early American and early modern studies a great favor in producing this fine edition of that commonplace book. The text is further enhanced by their jointly authored insightful prologue on the genre and the culture it was grounded in and by their section of scholarly commentaries on the entries for which sources can be identified. There is also a single-author essay by Lockridge, in which it is persuasively demonstrated that a commonplace book may bear a very personal signature. The assemblage serves as a kind of Rorschach test; its selections reveal a lot about the writer's particular concerns and indeed obsessions. The usually very conventional material selected may be historically all the more instructive for its banality in its own time.	3
From references in the text, the editors are able to bracket the approximate dates within which were written most of the continuous sequence of transcriptions and paraphrases in this commonplace book. Entry number 91 (out of the total of 573) probably falls after July 1723; so it seems likely that the book was begun in 1721 or soon after, when the forty-seven-year-old Byrd came to live once more in London. Most of the book therefore--at least as far as entry number 489, referring to "the Females of this island" (p. 183)--was inscribed in England before its writer returned to Virginia in 1726. (Byrd had been compelled to go to the home country to apologize for his conduct toward Virginia's lieutenant governor, Alexander Spotswood, and so to abandon his ambitions to be appointed to that post himself; he seems to have lingered in the metropolis to see if he could at least make a good marriage there.) The topics and tone of many entries appear to reflect Byrd's bitterness at his several failures in the courting of English ladies of family and fortune.	. . .