Facebook's precursor

A Cambridge researcher specialising in the history of fan mail will be presenting a five-minute slot on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves at 10pm this evening. Dr Corin Throsby has been chosen for a BBC Radio 3 scheme called New Generation Thinkers set up to encourage early career academics to broadcast their ideas.

Tonight she will be talking about 19th-century 'commonplace books' – scrapbooks in which people copied their favourite poems and collected together other items – and showing how they were the basis for an early version of what we now call social networking.

“Typically commonplace books were leather-bound albums in which people recorded and saved all kinds of things – poems, drawings, letters, bits of writing, as well as witticisms and anecdotes. Like Facebook, they were a means for constructing a 'profile' of what you liked. They were shared with other people as a way of showing off your taste and your circle of friends. Your friends then made witty contributions to the books - just like a Facebook 'wall',” says Throsby.

“Commonplace books also challenge our perceptions of what people were reading in the Romantic period, the period I’m most interested in. The poets that we now consider to be the greats, like Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Blake, are almost non-existent in these books. Commonplace books show that Byron, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and Felicia Hemans were way more popular at the time.”

Commonplace books are among the examples of 19^th-century 'fan culture' that Throsby is writing about in her forthcoming book on the history of fan mail. Her research on commonplace books is based largely on a collection belonging to renowned book historian Professor William St Clair, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge.

“These books are a fascinating account of how people read and ‘networked’ in the 19th century,” says Throsby. “They show that behaviour we tend to think of as being a product of the internet age has actually been around for centuries.”

Earlier this year Throsby and nine other academics from British universities were selected from more than 1,000 applicants for a scheme called New Generation Thinkers run by BBC Radio 3 in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The scheme, which is in its first year, is aimed at early career researchers who are passionate about communicating their scholarship to a wider audience. The ten researchers on the scheme are working with mentors on Night Waves to develop and present their own shows.

“It’s amazing to be part of the scheme and there’s a great feeling of camaraderie between the ten of us taking part. I’m learning an enormous amount about how to communicate in a way that’s accessible and relevant to the audience,” says Throsby. “Academics need to be thinking more about how to make their ideas understood by the wider community. The BBC and the AHRC should be applauded for undertaking such a scheme.”

Throsby teaches English and essay writing at Trinity Hall and Homerton College, Cambridge. She is also Senior Editor at Open Book Publishers, an open access initiative run by academics at the University of Cambridge. She graduated from the Australian National University (ANU) with the University Medal in English, and came to the UK on a James Fairfax Scholarship to take a DPhil at Oxford University. At the ANU she edited the student newspaper and at Oxford she presented a weekly music and culture show on Oxide radio.

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