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.