The Georgian commonplace book enjoyed the most obvious affinities with the contemporary fashion for diary-keeping: ‘Self-examination would give them a true State of themselves’, The Spectator promised in 1712, coining what might almost be the informal motto of the next century, ‘and incline them to consider seriously what they are about.’ Such confidence in the capacity of self-knowledge to improve understanding and modify conduct is surely why commonplacing also gravitated in the same direction, holding out an effective means to documenting not only reading but also – even more importantly – the self. Yet this development in no sense undermined the fundamental literariness of commonplacing.