Scrapbooking on the Royal Family: self-fashioning and family archiving in modern Britain

The Royal Family was a popular subject on which Britons kept scrapbooks in the twentieth century. The 1937 and 1953 Coronations, mid-century Royal Tours, and the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981 were all events which populated the pages of hundreds of scrapbooks. People fashioned Royal scrapbooks out of everyday household items such as brown paper or purchased one from the growing marketplace of commercially designed volumes. Scrapbookers sometimes began their volumes independently; other times they created them at the recommendation of tabloid journalists and schoolteachers. 

Drawing on some of these scrapbooks, together with memoirs, newspaper clippings, and oral history interviews, the first part of this paper explores how people used scrapbooking on the Royal Family to construct and explore their own and their family members’ subjectivities. Decades later, it is the association of these books with their makers’ often youthful, subjectivities, which provoke a range of emotions from the scrapbook’s current custodians. 

The second part of this paper explores the often complex after-lives of these scrapbooks and specifically what they represent to their makers and family members. In sum, this paper explores a cultural high point in the history of scrapbooking and uses this to illuminate the importance of conservative values to material expressions of selfhood in the twentieth century.