Is it possible to use an album's contents to construct a narrative about the interpersonal relationships between those who signed and dated their transcriptions? A flea‐market purchase of an album bearing poetry transcriptions in multiple hands, all signing from 1824 to 1827, and most from a single Dublin address, made me curious about the album's creator, Thomasina Newcomen, and the circumstances surrounding the creation of her album. In tracing the album's signatories in the archives, I discovered that the entries reflected both the personal story of a teenage courtship and also national questions regarding Anglo‐Irish relations in the early nineteenth century. Is it time for a poetics of the album as a distinct form, that recognizes the possibility of the interrelation of transcribers’ entries, and the many stories that may be written between the lines?
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