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The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture, 2020
By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery... more By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the chapter offers an exemplary instance of the issues at stake in album culture. The book was instrumental in promoting the elite practice of inscribing occasional texts in albums. In 1789 fashionable newspapers the World and the Oracle publicly fought over ownership of a transcript from the album and of ‘Della Cruscan’ poetry. The quarrel gave rise to scurrilous journalism, satirical prose, and parodic verse in which the term ‘album’ and its occasional and heterogeneous aesthetic was claimed and contested. In William Gifford’s attack on the Della Cruscans, Bell’s poetry anthology The British Album (1790) became shorthand for poetry’s debasement through cultural feminization. The Grande Chartreuse album disappeared during the French Revolution, but created a grand origin myth for the Romantic album.
Journal of British Studies, 2022
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture, 2020
Charles Lamb treated album verses as occasions for rethinking and recuperating human relationship... more Charles Lamb treated album verses as occasions for rethinking and recuperating human relationships in an alienating modern culture. Lamb uses the unpromising occasion of writing a poem for a stranger to meditate on ethical, formal, and affective questions raised by the album transaction. Lamb’s poems for strangers problematize female identity; they draw on gendered stereotypes or nominative determinism but suggest that names and albums are unreliable determinants of female identity. One such poem for a stranger was the primary evidence in critical debates triggered by Lamb’s collection Album Verses, with a Few Others (1830). The chapter shows why Lamb presented an aesthetic defence of this minor, occasional genre, resisting the aggressive masculinity of periodical reviewing, and affiliating himself instead with the marginal literary values of manuscript culture—the feminine, domestic, and juvenile.
Victorian Review, 2021
I The Woman in White (1860), the lawyer Gilmore describes an interview with his client, Laura Fai... more I The Woman in White (1860), the lawyer Gilmore describes an interview with his client, Laura Fairlie, shortly before her forced marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. He notices as they talk that she toys with an album containing “a small water-colour landscape” (Collins 143). At the mention of Glyde’s name, Laura “took her hand off the little album as suddenly as if it had turned hot and burnt her” (143). The reader knows, as Gilmore does not, that the landscape was painted by Walter Hartright, and that the book signifies her suppressed love for the drawing master. Laura’s handling of the album narrates her unspeakable emotional struggle: when her fingers “beat gently on the margin of the drawing, as if her memory had set them going mechanically with the remembrance of a favourite tune” (145), she is recalling musical evenings with Hartright; but when “the hand on the album resigned its hold, trembled a little, and moved the book away” (145), Laura is resigned to her fate and bursts into...
Introduction - Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 1 'How bursts the landscape on my sight!&#... more Introduction - Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 1 'How bursts the landscape on my sight!': Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape - Felicitas Menhard 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality - Jacqueline Labbe 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland - Kristin Ott 4 'Plumb-Pudding Stone' and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-9) - Tom Furniss 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake - Nicola J Watson 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere - Polly Atkin 7 'O all pervading Album!': Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry - Samantha Matthews 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination - Stefanie Fricke 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) - Angela Wright 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the 'Mysteries of the New School': A Romantic Journey - James Vigus 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans - Rolf Lessenich 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama - Sophie Thomas 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's 'Magnificent Debt' - J Douglas Kneale 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythgoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths - Rosa Karl 15 'An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness': Scott's The Talisman - Silvia Mergenthal 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World - Christoph Bode
‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected... more ‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s ‘albo-mania’ come from, and why was it satirized as a women’s ‘mania’? What was the relation between visitors’ books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums’ re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a ‘feminized’ practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women’s culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture’s privileging of ‘original poetry’ have to say about attitudes towards creativity, poetic practice, and the print marketplace? Album Verses recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by the Lake poets’ daughters. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows that album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations between 1780 and 1850.
The Byron Journal, 2011
TEXT AS PROCESS: CREATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON. By Sally Bushell. C... more TEXT AS PROCESS: CREATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON. By Sally Bushell. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 302. ISBN 978 0 8139 2774 9. £48.95 Text as Process grows out of Sally Bushell's work co-editing a long poem with a complex manuscript history for a prestigious series: The Excursion, edited with James Butler and Michael Jaye, in the Cornell Wordsworth series (2007). Unable to find a satisfying and robust method- ology for her work on Wordsworth manuscripts within the Anglo-American textual editing tradition, Bushell presents Text as Process as a provisional but powerfully synthesised contribution to filling that gap. The book proposes a theoretically-informed methodology to promote the grounded critical interpretation of the drafts of nineteenth-century poetic texts, and other prepublication materials associated with them, considered in their own right and not simply as background to the published work. This methodology is then...
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture, 2020
By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery... more By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the chapter offers an exemplary instance of the issues at stake in album culture. The book was instrumental in promoting the elite practice of inscribing occasional texts in albums. In 1789 fashionable newspapers the World and the Oracle publicly fought over ownership of a transcript from the album and of ‘Della Cruscan’ poetry. The quarrel gave rise to scurrilous journalism, satirical prose, and parodic verse in which the term ‘album’ and its occasional and heterogeneous aesthetic was claimed and contested. In William Gifford’s attack on the Della Cruscans, Bell’s poetry anthology The British Album (1790) became shorthand for poetry’s debasement through cultural feminization. The Grande Chartreuse album disappeared during the French Revolution, but created a grand origin myth for the Romantic album.
Journal of British Studies, 2022
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture, 2020
Charles Lamb treated album verses as occasions for rethinking and recuperating human relationship... more Charles Lamb treated album verses as occasions for rethinking and recuperating human relationships in an alienating modern culture. Lamb uses the unpromising occasion of writing a poem for a stranger to meditate on ethical, formal, and affective questions raised by the album transaction. Lamb’s poems for strangers problematize female identity; they draw on gendered stereotypes or nominative determinism but suggest that names and albums are unreliable determinants of female identity. One such poem for a stranger was the primary evidence in critical debates triggered by Lamb’s collection Album Verses, with a Few Others (1830). The chapter shows why Lamb presented an aesthetic defence of this minor, occasional genre, resisting the aggressive masculinity of periodical reviewing, and affiliating himself instead with the marginal literary values of manuscript culture—the feminine, domestic, and juvenile.
Victorian Review, 2021
I The Woman in White (1860), the lawyer Gilmore describes an interview with his client, Laura Fai... more I The Woman in White (1860), the lawyer Gilmore describes an interview with his client, Laura Fairlie, shortly before her forced marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. He notices as they talk that she toys with an album containing “a small water-colour landscape” (Collins 143). At the mention of Glyde’s name, Laura “took her hand off the little album as suddenly as if it had turned hot and burnt her” (143). The reader knows, as Gilmore does not, that the landscape was painted by Walter Hartright, and that the book signifies her suppressed love for the drawing master. Laura’s handling of the album narrates her unspeakable emotional struggle: when her fingers “beat gently on the margin of the drawing, as if her memory had set them going mechanically with the remembrance of a favourite tune” (145), she is recalling musical evenings with Hartright; but when “the hand on the album resigned its hold, trembled a little, and moved the book away” (145), Laura is resigned to her fate and bursts into...
Introduction - Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 1 'How bursts the landscape on my sight!&#... more Introduction - Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 1 'How bursts the landscape on my sight!': Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape - Felicitas Menhard 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality - Jacqueline Labbe 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland - Kristin Ott 4 'Plumb-Pudding Stone' and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-9) - Tom Furniss 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake - Nicola J Watson 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere - Polly Atkin 7 'O all pervading Album!': Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry - Samantha Matthews 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination - Stefanie Fricke 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) - Angela Wright 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the 'Mysteries of the New School': A Romantic Journey - James Vigus 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans - Rolf Lessenich 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama - Sophie Thomas 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's 'Magnificent Debt' - J Douglas Kneale 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythgoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths - Rosa Karl 15 'An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness': Scott's The Talisman - Silvia Mergenthal 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World - Christoph Bode
‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected... more ‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s ‘albo-mania’ come from, and why was it satirized as a women’s ‘mania’? What was the relation between visitors’ books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums’ re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a ‘feminized’ practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women’s culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture’s privileging of ‘original poetry’ have to say about attitudes towards creativity, poetic practice, and the print marketplace? Album Verses recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by the Lake poets’ daughters. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows that album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations between 1780 and 1850.
The Byron Journal, 2011
TEXT AS PROCESS: CREATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON. By Sally Bushell. C... more TEXT AS PROCESS: CREATIVE COMPOSITION IN WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND DICKINSON. By Sally Bushell. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 302. ISBN 978 0 8139 2774 9. £48.95 Text as Process grows out of Sally Bushell's work co-editing a long poem with a complex manuscript history for a prestigious series: The Excursion, edited with James Butler and Michael Jaye, in the Cornell Wordsworth series (2007). Unable to find a satisfying and robust method- ology for her work on Wordsworth manuscripts within the Anglo-American textual editing tradition, Bushell presents Text as Process as a provisional but powerfully synthesised contribution to filling that gap. The book proposes a theoretically-informed methodology to promote the grounded critical interpretation of the drafts of nineteenth-century poetic texts, and other prepublication materials associated with them, considered in their own right and not simply as background to the published work. This methodology is then...