Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident

… a quilt of patchwork consists of various miscellaneous pieces of different hues and qualities, but jointly combining to make a pleasing and useful whole … in the formation of the Album there is much wider scope for the Mind—a more intellectual occupation; whilst it keeps up a constant and rational excitement during its progress, it becomes a repository for the most endearing sentiments of friendship and affection.

—John Britton, “An Album,” prose paragraph written into the Mrs. Anna Birkbeck Album, ca. 1841

A sort of drive compels us to take the Book apart, to make it into a piece of lace.

—Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

The moment the eponymous narrator of “the adventures of an Album” launches its first-person memoir it is already on the defensive. Appearing in 1831 in the annual The Comic Offering; or Ladies’ Mélange of Literary Mirth, this tale has lines from Lord Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers for its epigraph: “’Tis pleasant sure to see oneself in print, / A book’s a book although there’s nothing in’t.” The first words this narrator addresses to its readers involve this “impertinent” couplet: “half a hundred persons of my acquaintance” will doubtless recall it, the narrator predicts, when they learn that a “poor Album (with no ideas of my own, and depending for existence on the genius of others)” intends to write its own memoirs: “But this threadbare quotation is totally inapplicable to me: for although I am a Book, yet it is unjust to say ‘there’s nothing in it’, when so many of my pages are filled with charming poetry and unrivalled paintings.”¹

In fact, the storyline that follows, in which this voluble book recounts its passage from human hand to human hand and tracks how those once-blank pages got filled, confirms there might be reasons for the derision the Album expects. Doubts about the Album’s claims to “charm” or “genius” set in just after the adventures begin, when the Album, passing from its mistress’ hands, ends up being passed to a certain bel esprit in her circle. This second woman pretends to supply an original poem to fill up the Album’s opening page but instead plagiarizes from, of all people, Lord Byron. (The knowing album detects the deception, but its mistress, busy exulting over the fact that she has succeeded in documenting her social connection to the Byron-copyist, does not.) Circulating once again after this page has been filled, the Album arrives in the household of a certain Miss Susan Slattern. There its silk bindings are spotted with grease, and the pages between the covers fare no better, though two obtain a clever picture and a poem. Our adventuresome but accident-prone protagonist wends its way next to the home of a married couple who are thought to be very much in love, and there the Album acquires from the husband “an allegorical design of two doves, and two hearts, and two cupids, and two altars, and two torches, and Hymen and Time, and all the other paraphernalia of valentine notoriety,” while the wife contributes a similarly uxorious poem.² During this same phase of its life, however, the Album is also susceptible to being used as a missile and hurled across the room during one of the quarrels that occur behind the public façade of marital bliss. Additional episodes of disillusionment follow as the book-protagonist’s once-pristine pages are incrementally filled in.

By now many real equivalents of this fictional album have found their way from nineteenth-century drawing rooms to their final resting place in archives and special collection libraries. Between about 1790 and 1850, and before they were superseded by related book forms like the photograph album and (in America) the high school year book, these volumes were assembled in great numbers and in multiple locations, from South Carolina to Quebec City to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Carbonear, Newfoundland, to Glasgow to Manchester. Some snippet of Byronic poetry, the sample I have explored indicates, gets inscribed onto the leaves of about every...