page_title: Confession album
section_title: Britain and America
hierarchical_section_title: Confession album / History / Britain and America
caption_attribution_description: The cover of a confession album from the late 1860s
context_page_description: The confession album, or confession book, was a kind of autograph book popular in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Instead of leaving free room for invented or remembered poetry, it provided a formulaic catechism. The genre died out towards the end of the century, with occasional brief revivals in the twentieth century. The same kind of form is now found in the Dutch vriendenboek and German Freundschaftsbuch, used by small children; and the questions that the confession album contained live on in the Proust Questionnaire often used for celebrity interviews.
context_section_description: The origins of the confession album are unclear. Samantha Matthews notes the similarity to oracle games of the first half of the nineteenth century (she cites examples from 1810 to 1852).  These interactive books, which bore titles such as The Young Lady's Oracle: A Fireside Amusement, included questions that resemble those of the confession albums (for instance "Which is your favourite flower?", "Which is your favourite historical character?"), including sexually distinguished questions appropriate to courtship (for instance, "What is the character of your lady love?", "What is the character of him you love?").
  
  Whatever their origins, confession albums were an established form by the 1860s: Henry d'Ideville records using an album in 1861 (see Germany and France below); Karl Marx filled out answers to one in the spring of 1865 (his favourite colour was red); and Friedrich Engels answered another in 1868 (his idea of happiness was Château Margaux 1848). Early albums often had blank pages into which owners would paste the questionnaires; the questions on these could be preprinted or handwritten. One such album with handwritten questions, was that of Karl Marx's daughter Jenny, which contains entries dated from 1865 to 1870.  For some of these, she sent the questions to friends, asking them to fill them out and return them.  Her comments in a letter of November 1865 suggest that she regarded the genre as a novelty:
  I have a whole book filled up in that way and the answers are very amusing when compared with one another.  These Confession books have put albums and stamp books quite into the shade.  … I should much like to have answers.  It is more interesting and amusing than a mere Autograph.
  
  By the end of the decade, the printed and bound confession book had been introduced.  The earliest currently known example with a printed publication date is Mental Photographs, an album published in New York in 1869, which contained place for a photograph as well as the set of questions (a combination already found in Jenny Marx's album). The albums seem to have enjoyed their greatest popularity in the following decades, but to have become unfashionable by the early years of the twentieth century.  At their height, confession albums were widespread enough that in 1883 Douglas Sladen could rely on readers' familiarity with the form to play on it with a poetical answer. He begins:
  My favorite  virtue, I confess, is chivalrous devotedness,
  
  My favorite quality in man, the manful genius that can
  
  With iron will and eye sublime, up to the heights of empire climb;
  
  Although in woman, as I think, gentleness is perfection's pink
  
  This ubiquity was accompanied by a certain exasperation.  In a novel of 1886, a character asks: "A propos of the confessional, did any of you ever come under the torture of that modern Inquisition, the 'Confession Book?'"  Early twentieth century writers look back on the books as a long unfashionable genre.  A writer in 1915 records:
  So far as I can recollect it was voted a bore at the end of the 'seventies and, except in suburban homes, such as my own, was never referred to except with a yawn or a smile after the early eighties.
  The Daily Chronicle in 1906 remarks: "'If not yourself, who would you rather be?' was a favourite question of the confession album of the seventies." A. A. Milne (1882–1956) looked back in 1921 on the album as something from his childhood:
  The confession-book, I suppose, has disappeared. It is twenty years since I have seen one. As a boy I told some inquisitive owner what was my favourite food (porridge, I fancy), my favourite hero in real life and in fiction, my favourite virtue in woman, and so forth.
  Some album producers saw World War I as an opportunity to revive the confession book.  The new albums, unlike their Victorian predecessors, ignored questions appropriate to courtship.  They were clearly intended to be filled out by soldiers, a point spelt out in the title of one: My Brave Friend's Confession Book (1915).
caption: The cover of a confession album from the late 1860s
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