“Paying the tribute of a song”: the poetry of albums and visitors’ books

Victorian commentators identified visitors’ books with mass tourism and disparaged their contents as banal absurd. However, a historicised approach shows that inscription conventions commentators’ expectations were influenced by the print mediation of earlier practices centred on blank books, notably poetry composed for British country house albums. This article demonstrates how album published in late eighteenth century shaped later practice in, reception of, books. An artform which could elevate beyond recording fleeting encounters places persons, writers deploying literary strategies to construct guest–host dynamic navigates between familiar formal, hospitality payment. Album establishes complimentary rhetoric fantasy belonging sets an unrealistic model contributions public commercial settings.