Negotiating Intimacy in British Romantic Friendship Albums

Abstract

This article explores the integral role that the practice of friendship album-keeping played in British intellectual networks at the turn of the nineteenth century. The friendship album's draw among contemporaries, and deterrent to researchers, is that the album's intimacy is achieved through the practice's refusal to consider its legibility beyond its immediate circle. Instead, each album's significance resides in the affective residue of lived experiences that is expressed differently in each album. Friendship albums engage primarily with contemporary topics and literature and thus are a part of Romantic-era album culture, including manuscript miscellany albums and gift books; but contributors convey friendship through personalized acts of archiving, including tracing and copying, as well as literary and artistic imitations, adaptation, and invention that use early modern literary and social networking traditions for inspiration. In all cases, the friendship album's casual approach to archiving insists that outsiders remain uncertain of social dynamics, contributor intentions, and conversations that lay beyond the album pages. Contributions discussed include the original writing of Amelia Opie, Hannah More, and the young Felicia Browne Hemans, as well as amateur contributors, many of whose entries and even albums remain unsigned and unattributed.