A hybrid genre

The main focus of previous chapters has been on personal correspondence. Although diaries, notebooks and other written forms have never been forgotten, the discussion so far has centred for the most part on letters between soldiers, emigrants and their families at home. This chapter turns to a completely different and unfamiliar genre of writing – the memory book. Memory books had a distinguished history. Just like the letter itself, they evolved from aristocratic and mercantile origins to become, by the nineteenth century, useful instruments for writers of more modest social status. Before the eighteenth century, lower-class writers of memory books were rare; probably fewer than ten per cent of livres de raison were kept by artisans in France until the nineteenth century. The sociology of authorship, however, changed, and in the nineteenth century the authors of surviving memory books do include a significant number of peasants and artisans.

These peasant authors were comparatively well off, like the Asturian campesinos acomodados who supplied so many of the emigrants discussed in chapters ten and eleven. Artisan authors tended to be upwardly mobile, like the sculptor Rinaldo Cosmi, who made statues and altarpieces for churches and private individuals in early nineteenth-century Ascoli Piceno, in the Marches region of central Italy. Cosmi’s memory book told the story of his professional success and social promotion which culminated in the purchase of a house on the Corso Mazzini.