19th-century meme

You know those questionnaires that get circulated through the blogosphere, a list of questions (about likes and dislikes and such) that you're supposed to answer and then pass along to others?

Turns out the idea's been around a lot longer than I thought:

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he discovered a questionnaire in an English-language album belonging to his friend Antoinette[...], entitled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was a fad among wealthy English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the taker.

--Wikipedia article on Proust Questionnaire

I should note that the article is entirely unsourced, so I have no idea whether that line about it having been a fad is true or not.

Apparently Vanity Fair regularly runs celebrity answers to a similar questionnaire, and the TV show Inside the Actors Studio asks guests an allegedly related but entirely different set of questions.

Still, I'm intrigued by the idea that a hundred and some years ago, relatively ordinary people were passing around this kind of questionnaire, and now it's happening again online. Is it a continuous tradition? Have people been doing this all along, on paper and in email and such? Or is it a revival? And how far back does the idea go? Did Jane Austen write up her meme answers and send them to friends? Did Shakespeare?

4 Responses to “19th-century meme”

  1. Farah

    I’m fairly sure it turns up in _What Katy Did at School_ and I’ve certainly come across it in 1910s girls’ school stories.

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  2. Anonymous

    I found lots of them in J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, and had the same reaction you did. Looks like Barrie and Proust were roughly contemporary.

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  3. Debbie N.

    The comment above (about Barrie) was me; I thought I had signed in.

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  4. I Am The Kermix

    Don’t know much about history, but there were variations on the “Slam Book” when I was in high school in the late 1980s/early 1990s, so it’s entirely possible they got the idea passed down from their grandparents’ grandparents.

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