What’s in a Name?

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.