keepsake

Noun

keepsake (plural keepsakes)

1. An object given by a person and retained in memory of something or someone; something kept for sentimental or nostalgic reasons.
   • And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short...1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Two. The First of the Three Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. […], London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 69
   • My little keepsake—only a brooch—lay on the table at her bedside, with her prayer-book, and the miniature portrait of her father which she takes with her wherever she goes.1859 November 26 – 1860 August 25, [William] Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1860, →OCLC
2. (historical) Specifically, a type of literary album popular in the nineteenth-century, containing scraps of poetry and prose, and engravings.
   • He had brought the last “Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate...1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXVII, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book III
   • […]it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to ourselves—in spite of our own changes and of Italy’s—that we have ceased to believe in.1875 January–December, Henry James, Jr., Roderick Hudson, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co., published 1876, →OCLC; republished as...