Reconstructing the ‘Cossey Hall’ Album

The Jerningham family began their influential British country house album at Cossey Hall, Norfolk, in 1785: a defining moment in public awareness of the elite practice. Lady Frances Jerningham’s letters chart the book’s transition from a novel amusement to a meaningful agent in the family’s social network, and in constructing their public image. Contributors ranged from the family’s children and neighbours, to authors including Arthur Murphy and Amelia Opie. Edward Jerningham’s ‘Lines written in the Album, at Cossey Hall’ (1786), appropriated by the periodicals, became the most widely known album poem of the late-eighteenth century, and made the Cossey volume the most famous English album of the age. Drawing on family letters and contemporary periodicals, the chapter demonstrates how a unique manuscript book kept behind closed doors became not only a record of domestic and local affairs, but of public and political events, over two generations.

Introduction

Virginia Woolf dismissed Byron’s early poetry as ‘album stuff’ and critics have assumed album poetry is inherently unoriginal and imitative. The introduction challenges these received ideas by laying out the aesthetic and cultural interest of this neglected hybrid, protean form designed to be read and circulated in manuscript, and which developed its own poetic language, generic conventions, and common themes. Writers of album poetry range from canonical Romantic poets, women poets, society poets, to amateurs, and albums create social spaces where different views of gender, hierarchy, and poetry clash. ‘Albo-mania’ has been seen as a phenomenon of the 1820s. The introduction traces the fashion’s origins in the 1780s, defines and contextualizes key terms ‘album verse’ and ‘album’, while analysis of Byron’s ‘Written in an Album’ (1812) lays out the characteristics and creative possibilities of album poetry examined in the six case studies which follow.

‘Here you may trace a pigmy hand, / And there a Giant strength’

Albums kept by Sara Coleridge, Edith May Southey, and Dora Wordsworth between the early 1820s and late 1840s show that that although the Wordsworth circle daughters’ access to their famous fathers’ literary networks resulted in books exceptionally rich in album verse by well-known contemporary poets, their poet-fathers’ practical assistance and symbolic influence exacerbated the anxiety of reception for amateur contributors, and complicated each woman’s role as agent and subject of her own book. In the Wordsworth circle albums, scribal publication is perilously close to conventional publication, and contributors negotiate between fulfilling the woman owner’s wishes and articulating awareness of the revered older poets’ scepticism or downright hostility to feminized album culture. The poet-father’s presence turns albums into contested textual spaces where generational, gender, and power dynamics are played out in poetry.

‘Like Her, Fair Book, be thou’

Chapter 3 examines six manuscript books which influential hostess Sarah Sophia Child-Villiers, fifth Countess of Jersey (1785–1867) kept in 1805–24. It argues that these manuscript compilations are overlooked technologies of power, influence, and creativity in elite Regency social and literary networks. The books reflect the shift towards collecting original poems during album-keeping’s transition to a popular practice, and show Jersey’s developing consciousness of the album as an expression and extension of her own identity. The albums document the range of reading, copying, and composing practices associated with guests’ visits to the Jerseys’ house at Middleton Park, from parlour games and flirtation, more formal and public tributes, and prestigious personalized poems in autograph by celebrated poets including George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore, as well as overlooked society poets such as W. R. Spencer.

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.

Coda

What is the value of Romantic albums and album verses? Poems often figure the album as a cornucopia or treasure, yet the critical reception derided this positive valuation, and many albums were destroyed or lost. The Victorian afterlife of Romantic album culture shows how its ambivalent relation to the print marketplace contributed both to its democratization and its decline as a medium for original poetry and creative experimentation. In 1830s album verses, Leigh Hunt aligned the female album-owner with the commodified ‘scrap-beggar’, while Robert Southey thought only partisan collectors would save unique books from destruction. The afterlives of Dora Wordsworth and Emma Isola Moxon’s albums demonstrate these conflicts, yet digital culture can help recover albums and album poetry from neglect. Joanna Baillie’s simile of the album as a net of fish affirms Album Verses’ arguments for the creative and ethical possibilities of album poetry as manuscript form in the age of mass print.

Albo-mania, Albo-phobia

1820s print culture had a love–hate relationship with album poetry. Although the publishing industry capitalized on the democratization of the elite album, most of the critical discourse was satirical. Women’s ‘albo-mania’ provoked ‘albo-phobia’. Male professional writers’ intense anxieties about cultural feminization and de-professionalization focus on album poetry. Anti-album discourse mediated sociocultural anxieties about the decline of poetry and rise in women and amateur writers’ participation in the literary marketplace. By contrasting anti-album discourse in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine with samples of published album verses by poets including Bernard Barton and Robert Charles Dallas, the chapter examines the genre’s identification with women, children, amateur writers, and newly literate classes deemed ineligible to participate in culture as agents rather than as consumers.

From ‘La Grande Chartreuse’ to The British Album

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.