Reading Lyric's Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals

Abstract

Reading Lyric's Form:The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals Lindsey Eckert In her introduction to the 1832 edition of Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, Letitia Elizabeth Landon laments, "The ideas that seemed at first so delightful, are grown common, by passing through the familiarizing process of writing, printing. and correcting."1 Landon's comments are directly informed by her extensive experience with writing, printing, and correcting, particularly as a prominent contributor to and editor of British literary annuals like Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, The Keepsake, and Heath's Book of Beauty.2 Landon's contemporaries also saw their work "grown common" in literary annuals; authors such as Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and William Makepeace Thackeray were frequent contributors.3 Such notable authors—along with the volumes' attractive bindings and elaborate illustrations—made the annual one of the most commercially successful genres in the period, "dominat[ing] the market for poetry from 1825 to 1835" at a time when it was shifting away from poetry to prose.4 In the context of the literary marketplace in which Landon and her annuals were a driving force, her introduction to Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book points to the specific commercial and material conditions facing Romantic writers. Initially, her emphasis on the distance between "delightful" ideas and the "familiarizing process" of their composition seems to echo more well-known Romantic descriptions of inspiration and writing, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous metaphor in A Defence of Poetry that the mind is "a fading coal."5 Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" is an abstract claim rather than an allusion to the physical process of composing lines of type to be printed on a press.6 Indeed, throughout A Defence of Poetry Shelley eschews the material conditions of handwritten composition as well as its tangible transmission to readers via print and the marketplace. By contrast, Landon points to the practical realities that mediate poetic ideas into commercial products. Her own writing, she claims, has become tiringly familiar to her, a feeling perhaps shared by many writers forced to [End Page 973] reread their work as it makes its way to publication. But beyond that, she suggests that through writing and, more importantly, printing, correcting page proofs, and ultimately selling her work, its literary content somehow seems familiar in more general and negative ways. For Landon, material form takes the sheen off of one's ideas, and the further removed that material form is from the author—say, a printed lyric as opposed to a handwritten poem—the more common, tired, and familiar a work becomes. Landon's preoccupation with the "familiarizing process" that transfers poetic ideas into common and even banal material forms was not unique. Others also worried that new technologies and industrial techniques such as steam and iron printing presses, stereotype printing, edition binding, and mechanized paper production injected a new type of uniformity into literature. Thomas Carlyle went so far as to decry "the Mechanical Age" in which he lived.7 "[B]ooks," he observed, "are not only printed, but in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery."8 The vast amount of printed texts that these technologies produced and the rapidly expanding reading public that consumed them caused nineteenth-century writers, especially poets, to rethink the relationship between literary forms—lyric, ode, sonnet, ballad—and material forms—manuscript, book, broadside, newspaper, musical score. As Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane have asserted, "[W]e find in this period a sustained effort to reimagine poetry not as a genre—a literary kind among kinds—but as a medium."9 Focusing on the mediums of Romantic poetry, particularly manuscript albums and printed literary annuals, this article explores connections between poetic form and the various material forms it takes. My approach takes its lead from the New Lyric Studies and its arguments for historical poetics.10 Scholars such as Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have convincingly argued that transhistorical understandings of lyric mistakenly conflate different types of poems that would have been distinct for historical readers and that likely would have encouraged different methods of reading genre...