Arranging Daily Gifts of Devotion

This chapter begins by examining some of the ways that Victorian readers inscribed, marked, and altered devotional books. Some kept albums, scrapbooks, and commonplace books in order to pluck and transplant, as it were, verse from original sources to their own blank books, while others annotated the pages of existing books or wrote lengthy dedications. Even as readers were engaged in their own tactile interactions with devotional texts, the religious publishing marketplace was emulating these material reading practices as though they were a form of domestic handicraft, as in Frances Ridley Havergal’s Four-Fold Counsel tetralogy, a series of botanically inspired devotional gift books. Another of Havergal’s popular gift book sets, known as the Royal Series, is instructive, moreover, of how the material organization of devotional books could make a gift-time of daily reading.