From ‘La Grande Chartreuse’ to The British Album

Abstract 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.