What, you may ask, is a Sprout questionnaire? Good question. It wasn’t always a Sprout questionnaire. In it’s former guise on this blog, it was a Glasgow Take on the Proust Questionnaire.
But back to the beginning. The Proust Questionnaire started life as a parlour game. Confession albums or confidence albums were the Victorian equivalent of the personality and psychology tests that are all over the internet these days. It was thought to give a measure of the sensibilities, tastes and aspirations if the person who
answered. When he was still a teenager, Marcel Proust answered a version of it and his candid handwritten answers were discovered after his death. Later, it was popularised in magazines and television and its origins misattributed to the writer but the name has stuck.
I tinkered with the questions, added one or two dubious refinements and found some victims. My original version was a Glasgow take on it only in so much as I was looking for willing Glaswegians to answer it as part of my series of posts about the city.
But nothing is sacred here. Recently, Proust went into the mixer and came out as Sprout. No relationship at all to small cabbage like vegetables, simply an anagram that made me smile. And while the questions no longer bare any resemblance to the Victorian parlour game, the answers are funny and revealing, and probably say more about the victim’s personality than the original.
Photo of Marcel Proust from Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 bekijk toegang 2.24.01.04 Bestanddeelnummer 919-9566. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands licence.
Helen M Taylor 