‘An album, a miscellany, a sort of patchwork’: ‘Curiosity’, Genre, and Literary Quality in Early British Reviews of The Dutt Family Album (1870)

This article focuses on the little-explored British reviews of the nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian poetry collection The Dutt Family Album (1870). I argue that these reviews take their cue in important ways from the Album ’s paratextual and generic framing. In their authorial preface, epigraphs, and identification with album poetry, the Dutts deployed strategic humility, operating within careful limits to land themselves a receptive audience. These apparatus also had a hand in sparking important debates over literary legitimacy. Simultaneously devaluing their poetry’s literary quality and claiming its legitimacy as ‘a curiosity’, the preface actively shaped the reviews published in the British press. This move of transmuting Indo-Anglian writing into a ‘curiosity’ tuned into a nineteenth-century propensity to assess quality against foreignness, which has in some ways survived in recent confessions of ‘postcolonial discomfort’ towards the Album . In this sense, the Album ’s early critical reception illuminates patterns of thought that persist into the present.