Confession album
The same set of questions were presented to Queen Victoria's second son, Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1873,[2] to Marcel Proust around 1885 and to Claude Debussy in 1889.
[3] 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?
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?
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 filled out answers to one in the spring of 1865 (his favourite colour was red); and Friedrich Engels answered another in 1868 (his idea of happiness was Château Margaux 1848).
Her comments in a letter of November 1865 suggest that she regarded the genre as a novelty:[8]I have a whole book filled up in that way and the answers are very amusing when compared with one another.
At their height, confession albums were widespread enough that in 1883 Douglas Sladen could rely on readers' familiarity with the form to play on it with a poetical answer.
A writer in 1915 records:[12]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.
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 and Mme de Solms, 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:[16]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.
[17] In the Netherlands, 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.
[18] The modern German Freundschaftsbuch ("Friendship book") has the same kind of preprinted questions and is typically aimed at the same age group.
[20] 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, starting in 1980,[21] and in Vanity Fair since 1993, under the name of "The Proust Questionnaire", which disguises its unintellectual British origins.
