In a black roan quarto notebook kept throughout the 1870s—arguably the most significant decade of her career—George Eliot (1963: 449) jotted down an errant thought: “Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.” Here Eliot incidentally captured a potential paradox of note-taking itself, for the act of chronicling perceptions of the world bears both explicitly personal and suggestively social dimensions. Though private notebooks most obviously facilitate thinking without scrutiny, the act of inscription enables transmission to interested audiences—as this famed author well knew at this late stage in her life. Moreover, if note-keeping offers a tantalizing prospect of “walk[ing] in clearness [by] ourselves,” it is also shaped by an inescapable “common mist”: the social medium of language through which all forms of self-expression unfold.
Simon Reader richly explores such tensions and apparent antinomies in Notework: Victorian...
