The Album as Museum? A Response to Patrizia di Bello on an Interdisciplinary Approach to Mrs Birkbeck's Album

This review develops Patrizia di Bello's model of the album as female collection outlined in her article ‘Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture'. The review explores the practice of Victorian women's album-making in the context of ideas about collecting and the nineteenth-century museum. It argues that such albums both appropriate and subvert aspects of museum practice. Mrs Birkbeck's album challenges the idea of a traditional, chronological display but it utilises the juxtapositional elements inherent in museum exhibition to great interpretive effect.

Bello has herself contributed to this body of work with recent articles that discuss the relationship between women, photography and visual culture in the nineteenth century. 2 Di Bello's article 'Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The Hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture' explores the links between literature and visual culture as they intersect in the practice of women's album-making. This is also the subject of her forthcoming book Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts which examines Victorian women's albums, in particular those which combine photography with other media. 3 Di Bello reminds us that Mrs Birkbeck's album is both interdisciplinary in the nature of its content but also that its meanings can only be unlocked through an interdisciplinary approach. The album, she writes: at once suggests and constructs a rich network of social and cultural contacts, whose histories, meanings and connotations cannot be fully analysed without not only an interdisciplinary approach, but also expertise -on the literary and art scenes of the time, on diplomatic and women's history, on visual and print cultures -best provided by a team (6).
By overseeing the digitalization of the album, Di Bello aims to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborative research into the individual contributions in the album and to make this unique object available to a wider audience. Are these created by the authors who have contributed individual entries to the album, or by Mrs Birkbeck as the collector or 'curator' of the album as a whole? Are we to see the album as the statement of an author, perhaps as a form of informal or private written speech, like diaries; or as evidence of reading practice, of how one particular woman read, copied, contributed or sought contributions of texts and images? (7). This multidimensionality will be fascinating to unpick once the digitization project is complete. Di Bello's aim in her article, however, is to explore the meaning of the album as a whole and to consider it 'as part of a feminine culture (and a culture of femininity) constructed by and through the image of the 'lady' (9).' She begins by focusing on those selfreflexive entries which address the topic of the album itself, arguing that these contributions reveal an understanding of the practice of album-making as a middle-class female accomplishment (10)(11)(12). In these, questions of arrangement and composition are immediately foregrounded. For example, an entry by John Britton explicitly addresses the form of the album, described as 'a quilt of patchwork [which] consists of various miscellaneous pieces of different hues and qualities, but jointly combining to make a pleasing and useful whole' (13).
This description of the album as 'various […] pieces' collected together to form a 'whole' invokes one of the Victorian period's most enduring institutions, the museum, which is the starting point for my own doctoral research on the museum idea in nineteenth-century literature. I would like to suggest a model in which women's album-making can be interpreted through an analysis of museum language and practices. 4 In this way, it is possible to show how the album both subverts and appropriates aspects of the Victorian museum. Di Bello remarks on the differences between the album and the museum arguing that unlike museums, 'albums impose little taxonomic order or value on their contents'(7) but the language she uses to describe the album suggests some interesting parallels. She talks about the 'sequences and juxtapositions' that are evident in the album, both of which are key elements in museum display (7). For example, it is noteworthy that the date of Anna Birkbeck's album also challenges the idea of the traditional, sequential taxonomic display.
Although it embodies a temporal space that runs from 1823 to 1851, the entries are not arranged chronologically. Hence a poem titled 'Solitude' dated 1823 is found on p187, after an anonymous sketch of two women on p.167, which dates from 1841. As Laurel Brake has argued in relation to the periodical, the album is also 'historical, contingent, looking backward and forward with a historical identity'. 6 In the same way that the contributions to the album form a rich, intertextual matrix, their historical identities engage in a kind of temporal interplay which challenges the concept of the chronologically progressive museum display. This historical interaction is illustrated further when we find that a ticket to the International Exhibition of 1862 is loosely inserted on p.41. Whilst this is suggestive of the museum interests of the readers of the album, 7 it also acts as a piece of chronologically displaced material culture, reminding us of the ongoing life of the album as literary artefact that continues to engage with the present after the death of its author/curator.
To dismiss the similarities between the album and the Victorian museum on the basis of the former's challenge to taxonomia, however, would be premature. Many Victorian Museums were systematic in their approach to display, drawing on evolutionary ideas to create typological narratives, but they are not synonymous with taxonomia. If we take a different model of the museum, it can be argued that in fact, women's albums utilize some aspects inherent in museum display, particularly juxtapositional elements. Recent work in Museum Studies (another discipline that can be brought usefully to bear on this subject) suggests a less reductive model of the museum in which the visitor is at the centre of the interpretive process and effects her own metonymic collisions by moving through and between objects. 8 This 'constructivist' museum visitor can be seen at play in the Victorian museum. Despite contemporary constructions of the nineteenth-century museum and its objects as 'intimately connected with notions of progress -historically, technically and socially', it is important to remember that museums also contain people and where the visitor enters, surprising things can occur. 9 One only has to look at fictional representations of museums (see the anarchic scenes at the Sydenham Crystal Palace in Gissing's Nether World) to see that visitors don't always read museum scripts, consume 'object lessons' or move through the space in the ways dictated by curators. 10 Mieke Bal has discussed how in the art museum, meanings emerge when 'one image reads another by hanging next to it', even if these meanings were not anticipated by the curator. 11 In Mrs Birkbeck's album, the juxtaposition of entries suggests a series of fascinating metonymic relationships. Di Bello points to an interesting combination of entries in which a poem by George Birkbeck is positioned in the album next to the card announcing his own funeral. Further exploration of the album will no doubt reveal more interesting juxtapositions, 'knowingly curated' or otherwise. 12 Like the visitor to the museum, the reader of the album is free to create her own associations by starting in the middle or dipping in and out and with this comparison, a clear affinity emerges between ideas inherent in readerresponse theory and the concept of the constructivist museum visitor. 13  Birkbeck but that take women as their subject. If we see these entries as collected 'objects' we can examine them using some key ideas about collecting and the construction of identity.
According to Russell Belk, 'because a collection results from purposeful acquisition and retention, it announces identity traits with far greater clarity and certainty than the many other objects owned'. 15 Thus, the objects with which we surround ourselves are part of our selves. 16 In this way, the poem on p.143 in which beauty is deemed to be of secondary importance to 'plain good nature' might suggest something of Anna Birkbeck's own views on the subject. The album is indeed a 'one-off'. A unique mixture of the verbal and the visual but also of the palpable; its materiality as book-object and the tactility of the decoupage in certain entries forming a key part of its character. Like many contemporary museums which have embarked on the digitization of their collections, these factors present a challenge to Di Bello's project. How can the materiality of the album, its 'thingness', be rendered digitally so that, in the words of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition project, a resource is created which 'preserves what is gained in readers' experiences of engaging with periodicals as historical material objects'. 17 In a recent reading of Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking my library', I was struck by his reference to women's album-making and his emphasis on the importance of the long-term survival of such objects: 'Now I put my hands on two volumes bound in faded boards which, strictly speaking, do not belong in a book case at all: two albums with stick-in pictures which my mother pasted in as a child and which I inherited'. 18 It is interesting to speculate on Benjamin's mother creating her album at around the same time as Mrs Birkbeck but Benjamin's essay is also illuminating in that it places the women's album alongside other literary artefacts worthy of consideration as part of a library. These include 'autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts [...] leaflets and prospectuses […] handwriting facsimiles […] and certainly periodicals'. 19 This acts as a useful (though somewhat daunting) reminder to those working in the field of nineteenthcentury studies of the sheer range of extant material available that demands attention, and its topical variety reminds us once again of the need to develop skills in interdisciplinary enquiry that will help make sense of it all.
The album is now part of a broader collection in the library at Birbeck and thus its 'museum life' continues. Benjamin talks about the importance of inheritance in relation to his mother's albums: 'For a collector's attitude towards his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility'. 20 Di Bello's digitization project will allow us all to become the heirs of Mrs Birkbeck's album and