Annotated

In Romantic Readers, H. J. Jackson argues that modern attitudes to marginalia--as something "private" and even disreputable--emerge after 1830.  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she claims, readers wrote in books as a matter of routine, whether to quarrel with the writer, make notes for another reader, or construct a personal index.  I haven't seen that many heavily annotated Victorian texts, but I wouldn't expect most of the novels I work with to attract much in the way of intense critical commentary; a number of books in my own collection have gift inscriptions, and one or two have marginalia, but that's it.  Even theological and polemical works don't appear to have stimulated much in the way of annotation.  When I was working on this, I came across only one marginal note--a funny (and lewd) anecdote about an actress, Eliza Vestris. 

By the time they're in my clutches, most of my students have overcome their deep-seated aversions to writing in their textbooks.  Highlighting appears to be the order of the day, although I occasionally see students using the margins to take notes on lectures.  I don't mark up my nineteenth-century novels at all, more out of anxiety about the cheap paper than any regard for the books-as-objects.  When it comes to works I'm teaching, my method differs according to genre: if it's poetry, I make extensive marginal notes, both verbal (critical comments) and visual (underlining, brackets); if it's fiction, I usually rely on underlining, brackets, and asterisks.  I usually teach poetry from the marginalia, rather than from a separately-written lecture; by contrast, I use marginal notes in novels as a kind of rudimentary outline for developing lectures later on (or, if I'm teaching a seminar, as a means of reminding myself what passages I want the students to discuss). 

Although Jackson argues that writing in books has been privatized or personalized, in the sense that the primary audience is the annotater and not another reader, my marginal notes are actually "public": I may be the only person who sees them, but they're still written to be shared with a group.   Jackson would also point out that there's no sign of close reading, in our post-New Critical sense, in Romantic-era texts; she finds people quibbling over a word or image here and there, but she sees almost no analysis. 

UPDATE: C'mon, folks.  I said "their textbooks," not "the library's books."