"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 and absurd. However, a historicised approach shows that inscription conventions and 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 poetry published in the late eighteenth century shaped later practice in, and reception of, visitors’ books. An artform which could elevate the album beyond recording fleeting encounters with places and persons, album poetry shows writers deploying literary strategies to construct a guest–host dynamic which navigates between the familiar and formal, and between hospitality and payment. Album poetry establishes a complimentary rhetoric and fantasy of hospitality and belonging that sets an unrealistic model for Victorian contributions to visitors’ books in public and commercial settings.