Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Adieu to Albums – for a great while, I said when I came here, and had not been fixed two days but my Landlord's daughter … requested me to write in her female friend's, and in her own; if I go to — thou art there also, O all pervading album! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me.
Writing to Bernard Barton late in 1827, after a modest relocation from suburban Islington to comparatively rustic Enfield, Charles Lamb jokingly associates his decision to flee literary London with the nuisance of being solicited for poems for albums; but albums were at the peak of their popularity in the late 1820s, and there is no escape even in Enfield. Lamb presents this cultural ubiquity in geographical terms, through a catalogue of remote locations: a Caribbean island group, the extreme northeast coast of Canada and the American Back Settlements. Chosen because they are both names of specific places and symbolically resonant (for Lamb) of the furthest reaches of civilization, the locations simultaneously figure the album as a symbol of culture and of cultural debasement, since it constitutes ‘literature’ in comparatively uncultivated settlements. More than a year later Lamb repeats the story of his failed flight from ‘Albumean persecution’ in a letter to Bryan Waller Procter, claiming that ‘If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will Albums be.
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- Romantic LocalitiesEurope Writes Place, pp. 99 - 116Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014