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Susan Holloway Scott, Bestselling Historical Fiction Author

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Screen Shot 2020-08-12 at 9.52.46 AM.png

Pins, the Georgian Post-It Used by Jane Austen

August 12, 2020

Pins were a necessity to everyday 18th c. life. Straight pins were widely used to fasten all kinds of clothing, from women's bodices to infant's diapers, and also used in hand sewing. Pins were considered so indispensable that when Abigail Adams wrote from colonial Massachusetts to her husband John Adams in London in 1775, the one thing she requested was for him to "purchase me a bundle of pins and put in your trunk for me." (Read the rest of the letter here.)

But I hadn't realized that pins were also an essential tool for 18th c. writers. Thanks to (or cursed by, depending on your point of view) computers, most modern writers submit manuscripts electronically. Rewrites and copy edits are all conducted now through the magic of track changes and transmissions. Gone are the days (when I was first published) of hauling specially-purchased boxes filled with tidy printed manuscripts to the post office. No longer are manuscripts read by editors and returned, marked up and bristling with pink "flags", the comments and queries pasted to the edges of pages for authors to answer or rewrite. I've gotten to the point where the only words on paper I see in the entire process are in the finished book – and with the growing popularity of e-books, that may one day vanish, too.

But what did writers do in the days before paper clips and Post-Its? How did an early novelist, editor, or typesetter who was already struggling to make sense of a handwritten manuscript mark revisions and additions? According to the librarians of Oxford's Bodleian Library, the answer is pins – and lots of them. All those notes and insertions and extra copy were handwritten on scraps of paper and pinned in the margin with a straight pin. The pins, above, were all plucked from the library's holdings, and date from 1692 to 1853.

In 2011, the Bodleian acquired a true Jane Austen rarity: the manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons. (See here for more about the auction, the staggering realized price, as well as a page of the manuscript itself.) In addition to the clues to cross-outs and rewrites on the draft provide, there were also a wealth of pinned-on additions. For purposes of preserving the manuscript, these pins were carefully removed with their notes, studied, catalogued, and saved – a librarian's scholarly labor of love.

But as a fellow-writer, I like to imagine Jane at work at her small writing table. I wonder: did she use the same pins she used for her clothing, or did she have another stash of pins reserved for writing? Did she keep a pin cushion on the table with a stack of scrap-paper sheets beside her inkwell, prepared and ready to make changes? Or did she tuck them into her sleeve like a hurried seamstress might, keeping them literally at hand when she needed them?

As a side-note: All of those indispensable pins were made by hand in the 18thc. Pin-making was a specialized trade, practiced by both women and men. According to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, there were eighteen distinct steps to creating a pin from brass wire, including cleaning the wire, cutting, pointing, and heading the shanks, whitening (tinning), washing, and finally inserting the finished pins into papers to sell. Depending on the size of the pin-making workshop, the various steps were performed by different workers, a specialized division of labor that helped increase production. Although contemporary accounts vary, an average 18thc English pin-making workshop produced about 2,000 pins a day per worker. Imagine spending an entire work-life, dawn until dusk, making nothing but pins….

Above: Manuscript pins, c. 1690-1850. Bodleian Library

My latest historical novel, The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr, is now available everywhere. Order here.

← Aaron Burr, a Bust of Napoleon, and Dreams of ConquestThose Mysterious 18thc Masks →

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From 2009 until 2018, Susan also blogged over at the Two Nerdy History Girls blog. Browse over 2,000 posts for a deeper dive into historical fashion, people, places, and lots more! 


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