Notebook of a Student at Opheleton Seminary in Plainfield, New Jersey, Documenting Her Reading Habits and Friendships, 1863–1868.
Plainfield, New Jersey: 1863–1868. Notebook measuring 6 ½ x 8 ¼ inches, with about 80 pp having text. Cover with wear especially to spine; very good. Contents generally excellent with about two pages too faded to read and some parts of pages cut out. Very good plus. Item #List38133 A notebook belonging to Opheleton Seminary student Jennie H. Clarke, with dates ranging from 1863 to 1868. Opened around 1851, Opheleton provided the daughters of well-off families in New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia with a year-round education in English language arts, history and politics, mathematics, and science. The notebook offers a look at the literary education and reading habits of a schoolgirl in the American North during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Most entries are Clarke’s selected quotes from many of the period’s most widely-read authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Conduct of Life), Henry David Thoreau (Walden), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Mosses from an Old Manse and The House of the Seven Gables), Oliver Wendell Holmes (Elsie Venner and The Professor at the Breakfast Table), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Hyperion and “A Psalm of Life”), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), William Cullen Bryant (“Thanatopsis”), Thomas Gray (“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”), Germaine de Staël (Corinne), Lord Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), Shakespeare (Hamlet), and others. Following a quotation from Holmes, Clarke adds the personal note, “The preceding from the ‘Proffessor at the Breakfast Table’ by my beloved O.W. Holmes,” an uncommon glimpse of the compiler’s own literary affections. Clarke also listed the books that she read during 1867, and a much shorter (presumably partial) list of the same for 1868, along with a list of what are likely required school texts and their prices, providing firsthand documentation of the curriculum and reading culture of a nineteenth-century female seminary. The volume also preserves numerous friendship inscriptions and verses contributed by classmates and acquaintances from New Jersey and New York, including Caldwell, Plainfield, Woodbridge, Bound Brook, Brooklyn, New York City, and Poughkeepsie, illustrating the social networks formed through women’s education in the period. One contributor copies a humorous manuscript parody of “Jessie, the Flower of Dunblane” rendered in a mock German accent, likely an inside joke between the two. Of interest to researchers of reading habits at the time, particularly of educated young women.
Price: $600.00
Status: On Hold