Next article FreeBook ReviewAlbum Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850. Samantha Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+291.Betty A. SchellenbergBetty A. SchellenbergSimon Fraser University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreSamantha Matthews’s Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture is a welcome shoot on the vigorous and growing branch of critical studies devoted to manuscript and participatory literary forms practiced in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone world. While the point has now been made forcefully that the choice of pen, ink, brush, watercolor, scissors, and glue pot did not cease with the widespread distribution and increasing affordability of print commodities, a quick review of Matthews’s substantial bibliography underscores her claim that very little work has attended specifically to the album vogue of the Romantic era. Matthews’s project is not only to suggest a trajectory of what she calls “albo-mania” but also to take the form at the center of the craze seriously as an element of the period’s literary culture. She approaches this through a double focus on the stories of individual albums as “virtual social space[s]” (4) and on album poems as the work of professional and amateur authors, circulating between scribal and print media, between gift and commodity, and between elite hostess and humble literary aspirant. Some of the genealogical questions Album Verses raises remain to be explored more convincingly, but the work done here to delineate the typical characteristics of the self-reflexive album poem—indeed, “to reclaim terms mostly used pejoratively” (11)—is illuminating and valuable as a foundation for further attention to a subgenre that, like all poetic forms, can facilitate expressions of wit, insight, and originality, or embody the most facile and empty of clichés.Matthews’s first two chapters detail two elite album projects of the late eighteenth century. The first of these, the album kept by the Grande Chartreuse Carthusian monastery, is read and written in by English travelers on the Grand Tour, most notably Thomas Gray and the Della Cruscan poets. The collection’s reputation in Britain is initially elevated, through the promotion in the newspaper the World of a collection of inscriptions from the album, then debased by means of satire in the rival paper the Oracle. Chapter 2 pieces together evidence of another lost album, that of Cossey Hall, country house of Sir William Jerningham and his wife Lady Frances Jerningham. This book performs a hybrid function, Matthews argues, as a domestically held celebration of the hospitable country estate and as the source of reflexive poems published in contemporary periodicals. Each of these chapters represents a significant investigative achievement, piecing together a fascinating and little-known story using a wide range of periodical and manuscript sources. What is less certain is that we are getting a genealogy of a craze that emerged decades later, despite some claims to this effect. In her introduction, Matthews suggests that the album emerged from the pocket book and commonplace book, while other elite compilations such as the Crewe Hall album, noted here, and poetry collections associated with the networks of the Duchess of Devonshire, Mary Tighe, and the Ladies of Llangollen, for example, attained similar public profiles. I would also have found illuminating a fuller, more sympathetic discussion of the mixed functions of such books and their contents in their own cultural moment, even if we are disposed to be less inclined to investigate literary practices belonging to a lingering great-house patronage system than those of their humbler successors. By contrast, the six manuscript albums of Lady Jersey (Sarah Sophia Child-Villiers), subject of the third chapter, are realized in much greater detail, no doubt helped by the fact that they still exist. Matthews uses these books to trace convincingly a shift between 1805 and 1824 from commonplace books featuring occasional contributions from friends to full-blown albums comprised primarily of autograph original verse addressed to the album’s owner. The last two Jersey albums overlap with the 1820s rise of the widespread album fashion, a fashion that Matthews suggests is an effect of the public exposure given to elite albums and album verses in the periodical press.The fourth chapter, “Albo-mania, Albo-phobia: Satire, Gender, and Album Verses in 1820s Print Culture,” is the heart of this study. Matthews examines the popularization of album keeping in that decade, along with the accompanying cultural backlash against a subgenre that was characterized by the overwhelmingly male, print-based literary-professional establishment as feminized, amateur, derivative, and degenerate. In addition to offering a finely detailed and convincing analysis of the periodical discourse about album keeping and album poetry, Matthews close reads several antialbum poems to demonstrate how their attacks coupled women, amateurs, the middle classes, and provincials together as “social groups traditionally constructed as readers and consumers, not creative agents” (140). As an eighteenth-centuryist, I find the vehement alignment of male literary professionals traced by Matthews especially ironic given its relatively recent date; its relation to the fates of magazines such as the Lady’s Magazine and to the ascendancy of criticism invites further investigation.Matthews’s fine reading talents are on further display in the most engaging and even moving chapter of the book: her “revisionary account” (164) of Charles Lamb’s significant body of album poetry. In demonstrating how Lamb could work within the conventional constraints of the subgenre to compose resourceful, sympathetic, and at times profound verses even when writing for a female album keeper whom he had never met, Matthews makes the strongest case in the book for the significance of this occasional form in the literary landscape of the Romantic era. In this context, her subsequent analysis of the reception history of Lamb’s 1730 volume of Album Verses takes on a polemical note that is welcome and justified. Seguing from the afterlife of Lamb’s album poetry in his posthumous 1836 Poetical Works, in which several poems addressed to obscure women are replaced by poems to the daughters of prominent literary figures, Matthews closes her study with a chapter on the albums of daughters of the Wordsworth circle: Sara Coleridge, Edith Southey, and Dora Wordsworth. As varied as the three women and their complex relations with their famous fathers, the albums and the correspondences surrounding them offer insight into the creation of such books as carefully planned and curated literary projects. While such documentation is not available for the majority of surviving albums, this chapter is a reminder that many of the lesser-known women and men who kept albums between 1780 and 1850 may have been similarly self-conscious and intentional about their literary collections. Samantha Matthews’s Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture establishes that albums and the poems they gave occasion to deserve more respectful attention as integral contributors to that culture. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726134 HistoryPublished online June 23, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.