The confession album, or confession book, was a kind of autograph book

Autograph book

An autograph book is a book in which one collects the autographs of others. Traditionally, these books would include small pieces of verse, personal messages, poems, and drawings from one's friends. Yearbooks, friendship books, and guest books are modern derivations...

 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 ("friends book") and German Freundschaftsbuch ("friendship book"), used by small children; and the questions that the confession album contained live on in the Proust Questionnaire

Proust Questionnaire

The Proust Questionnaire is a questionnaire about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by the French writer Marcel Proust....

 often used for celebrity interviews.

Questions

The questions posed in a confession album varied from volume to volume. A typical set of questions, in a book from the 1860s, is given below along with the answers of one respondent (see picture, right). The same set of questions were presented to Queen Victoria's second son, Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the third Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and reigned from 1893 to 1900. He was also a member of the British Royal Family, the second son and fourth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha...

 in 1873, to Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

 around 1885 and to Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 in 1889.

Question	Answer
Your favourite virtue.	Benevolence
Your favourite qualities in man.	Fearlessness & Uprightness
Your favourite qualities in woman.	Constancy & Affability
Your favourite occupation.	Riding
Your chief characteristic.	Reserve
Your idea of happiness.	Doing an act of kindness for anyone
Your idea of misery.	A fashionable dinner party in Town
Your favourite colour and flower.	Violet - The Moss-rose
If not yourself, who would you be?	A country squire with a comfortable income.
Where would you like to live?	Near Exeter.
Your favourite prose authors.	Lord Macaulay & Dickens.
Your favourite poets.	Byron & Longfellow.
Your favourite painters and composers.	Reubens & Handel
Your favourite heroes in real life.	Wellington & Havelock
Your favourite heroines in real life.	The Sisters of Mercy
Your favourite heroes in fiction.	Oliver Twist & Verdant Green The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green is a novel by Cuthbert M. Bede, a pseudonym of Edward Bradley . It covers the exploits of Mr Verdant Green as an undergraduate freshman at Oxford University. Different editions have varying titles, including Mr Verdant Green: Adventures of an Oxford Freshman...
Your favourite heroines in fiction.	None known to me.
Your favourite food and drink.	Haunch of Venison & "Madeira"
Your favourite names	Arthur. Herbert. Catherine. Edith. Josephine.
Your pet aversion.	Having a stout and stupid person to dance with.
What characters in history do you most dislike?	Richard III & Oliver Cromwell.
What is your present state of mind?	In a state of delightful uncertainty.
For what fault have you most toleration?	Slowness.
Your favourite motto	"No rose without thorns."
	J. P. Ilbert.

Among the questions found in other albums, several seem designed to help courtship, sometimes with a reflection of changing relations between the sexes, for instance "What is your opinion of the girl of the period?", " What is your opinion of the man of the period?"

Britain and America

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

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 filled out answers to one in the spring of 1865 (his favourite colour was red); and Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...

 answered another in 1868 (his idea of happiness was Château Margaux

Château Margaux

Château Margaux, archaically La Mothe de Margaux, is a wine estate of Bordeaux wine, and was one of four wines to achieve Premier cru status in the Bordeaux Classification of 1855. The estate's best wines are very expensive...

 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

Jenny Longuet

Jenny Marx Longuet was the eldest daughter of Jenny von Westphalen and Karl Marx.Known as 'Jennychen' in the Marx circle, Jenny Longuet, Marx's eldest daughter, was a socialist activist...

, 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

Douglas Sladen

Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen was an English author. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and went to Australia , where he became the first professor of history in the University of Sydney. Subsequently he traveled much and settled in London as a writer. Poems by Margaret Thomas were...

 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

Daily Chronicle

The Daily Chronicle was a British newspaper that was published from 1872 to 1930 when it merged with the Daily News to become the News Chronicle.-History:...

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

A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.-Biography:A. A...

 (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

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 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).

Germany and France

According to Henry d'Ideville, he had an "album-questionnaire" in which he collected the responses of friends and acquaintances in 1861, when as a diplomat in Naples he took the answers of Urbano Rattazzi

Urbano Rattazzi

Urbano Pio Francesco Rattazzi was an Italian statesman.-Biography:He was born in Alessandria . He studied law at Turin, and in 1838 began his practice, which met with marked success at the capital and Casale. In 1848, Rattazzi was sent to the Sardinian chamber of deputies in Turin as...

 and Mme de Solms

Laetitia Marie Wyse Bonaparte

Lætitia Marie Wyse Bonaparte was a French author.-Biography:She was born in Waterford, Ireland...

, which he reproduces. His account, written in 1872, explains the nature of the album, as though he did not expect readers to be familiar with it:

Here is what the operation consists of: you pose a series of questions to the unfortunate subject of the interrogation and he has to answer them one after the other. – What poet, what painter, what occupation, what pleasure, what sensation, etc. etc. do you prefer? The answers are written down, then the person signs and dates his interrogation and that's the game over.

British confession albums also circulated on the continent (see Questions above), and (perhaps in imitation of them) there were also questionnaire books in other languages. In Germany there were several, notably Erkenne Dich Selbst! ("Know Yourself"), which first appeared in 1878 and survived to around 1900, going through at least 22 impressions, produced by Friedrich Kirchner (1848–1900). The Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, which belonged to the same publishers as Kirchner's album, set his questions to celebrities, a forerunner of the modern use as the Proust Questionnaire; facsimiles of these answers were in turn printed in the album. In France, two are known, both containing the word Confidences in the title to represent the English "confessions". Here too the Revue illustrée set confession album questions to the famous, including Zola and Verlaine.

Friendship books

In Holland, where autograph books are very popular among young schoolchildren, publishers have recently started bringing out an alternative in the so-called vriendenboek or vriendjesboek ("Friends book"), which much like the confession album come preprinted with a set of questions about the respondents' hobbies, idols and wishes. Some children prefer the new format, which says more about the person answering, but most prefer the traditional autograph book, which leaves more room for their own creativity. The modern German Freundschaftsbuch ("Friendship book") has the same kind of preprinted questions and is typically aimed at the same age group.

Proust Questionnaire

In 1886, Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

, then a child of fourteen, filled out the answers to an English confession album, which bore the title Confessions. An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c. (his answers were auctioned in 2003 for $34,000). Interest in Proust led to a later revival of the questions as a kind of formulaic interview for celebrities, first by Léonce Peillard in France in the 1950s, later in French and American television and in the magazine of the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...

, starting in 1980, and in Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair (magazine)

Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...

since 1993, under the name of "The Proust Questionnaire", which disguises its unintellectual British origins. This use too had been anticipated by nineteenth century journals (see Germany and France).

External links

• Confession album entries for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at marxists.org
  Marxists Internet Archive
  Marxists Internet Archive is a volunteer based non-profit organization that maintains a multi-lingual Internet archive of Marxist writers and other similar authors...
  
  
• Confession album answers by Marcel Proust