Posts
 |
| Photo: @theMERL/YouTube |
We’ve all been there. Bored in class, we tune out the teacher’s lecture and doodle mindless scribbles off the edge of our paper. It comes with being a teenager, and pages unearthed and shared on Twitter by the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) show that this trend did not start recently. Pictures of 230-year-old doodles from an 18th-century teenager’s math homework show us that teens never really change.
Richard Beale was the 13-year-old artist behind several idle doodles shared over the weekend by Adam Koszary, MERL’s program manager. The discovery began with a box of what looked like 18th-century diaries from Kent. Only one of them wasn’t a diary, it was Richard Beale’s mathematics book...
Koszary, who runs the Twitter page, told the Guardian that the archives are full of items like this and that he hoped the tweets would “get people to come and use them.”
“When you see a 13-year-old from the 18th
century doing the kind of doodles that kids are doing today, it is so
relatable—there’s an instant connection,” he said. “Also, there’s the
fact it’s just so stupid.”
