ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 50
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ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 50 Cover designed by Annelie Drakman and Camilla Eriksson. Life mask of Benjamin Robert Haydon, by unknown artist (c. 1820). Plaster cast. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Every Man His Own Monument Self-Monumentalizing in Romantic Britain Chris Haffenden Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Auditorium minus, Gustavianum, Uppsala universitetsmuseum, Akademigatan 3, Uppsala, Friday, 9 November 2018 at 10:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Dr. Samantha Matthews (Bristol University, UK). Abstract Haffenden, C. 2018. Every Man His Own Monument. Self-Monumentalizing in Romantic Britain. Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 50. 263 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0451-9. From framing private homes as museums, to sitting for life masks and appointing biographers, new forms of self-monumentalizing emerged in the early nineteenth century. In this study I investigate the emergence and configuration of such practices in Romantic Britain. Positioning these practices at the intersection of emergent national pantheons, a modern conception of history, and a newly-formed celebrity culture, I argue that this period witnessed the birth of distinctively modern ways for the individual to make immortality. Faced with a visceral fear of being forgotten, public figures began borrowing from celebrity culture to make their own monuments. Concentrated upon early nineteenth-century London, I characterize these practices as attempts at self-made immortality. I do so by analyzing the legacy projects of three well-known but seldom connected individuals: the Auto-Icon by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748– 1832), the Soane Museum by the architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and the life-writing efforts of the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). Employing both sociological and materialist frameworks to analyze the making of immortality, I contend that these projects were characteristic of a novel regime for the production of lasting renown. Whereas earlier scholarship on Romantic recognition has tended to focus either on mass-media celebrity or the longer history of canon-formation, I highlight the interactions of celebrity and monument embodied in entrepreneurial efforts to secure future recognition. In Every Man His Own Monument, I demonstrate how a constellation of media forms and recording practices we now take for granted—the statuary figure, the house museum, and the published Life—assumed a central place within a new memorial regime. Bringing the historical roots of self-monumentalizing individuals to light, this study contributes to discussions both within the History of Celebrity and Cultural Memory Studies, and to broader debates regarding our Instagram-saturated present. Keywords: Self-monumentalizing, self-made immortality, history of celebrity, cultural memory, historical consciousness, Jeremy Bentham, Auto-Icon, John Soane, Soane Museum, Benjamin Robert Haydon, autobiography Chris Haffenden, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Box 629, Uppsala University, SE-75126 Uppsala, Sweden. © Chris Haffenden 2018 ISSN 1653-5197 ISBN 978-91-513-0451-9 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-361353 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-361353) To Elin, William, Clara, and Theodore Contents 1. Introducing self-made immortality ........................................................... 11 Self-made immortality as an object of study ....................................... 13 Excavating immortality: theoretical and methodological starting points .................................... 18 Looking beyond words: contexts and approaches ............................... 23 Competing immortality regimes in Romantic Britain ......................... 26 Empirical material and disposition ...................................................... 36 2. “Every man his own statue”: Bentham’s body as DIY monument .............................................................. 40 Framing the Auto-Icon in terms of self-made immortality .................. 44 Rejecting state immortality .................................................................. 46 Every man his own and the individualist manual ................................ 54 Bentham’s Auto-Icon as a performance of self-consecration .............. 60 Making the self-made statue ................................................................ 67 Staging the Auto-Icon .......................................................................... 79 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 89 3. “Perpetuating for the public my museum”: Soane’s house museum ................................................................................. 93 The house museum as self-made monument ....................................... 95 Soane’s strategies of self-commemoration .......................................... 97 Self-collecting and the self-made archive .......................................... 113 Soane’s museum as scrapbook .......................................................... 129 Soane’s ruins as self-consecration ..................................................... 140 Busting the pantheon ......................................................................... 161 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 167 4. A life in paper: Haydon and the making of a textual monument ......................................... 170 Parsing the autobiographical frame ................................................... 172 The struggle for “immortality in this world” ..................................... 175 Living as an immortal: the material practices of self-consecration ... 180 Haydon’s diary as self-made monument ........................................... 188 The personal archive as extraction of lasting value ........................... 197 Haydon’s Life as epitome of self-made immortality ......................... 206 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 212 5. Conclusion: self-made immortality in perspective .......................................................... 215 Encapsulating the regime of every man his own monument .............. 217 New directions in the history of nineteenth-century renown ............. 220 Digital immortality and the curating of the individual life ................ 222 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 226 List of images .............................................................................................. 228 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 234 Index of names ............................................................................................ 262 Fame is the recompense not of the living, but of the dead. The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot till the breath of genius is extinguished. William Hazlitt (1818) Mortality is ours without asking— but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Zygmunt Bauman (1992) 1. Introducing self-made immortality One of my principal points of departure is the curious instance of the Buribunks. Conceived of in a Carl Schmitt satire from the final years of the First World War, these fictional characters were a parodical take on the tendency of individuals to participate in shared practices of what Schmitt termed “self-historicization.”1 The Buribunks thus compulsively recorded their lives in minute detail via diary-writing practices in which they sought to document their existence for future publics. By enacting this project of self-inscription these relentless diary-keepers were committed to “consecrating [their] exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple.”2 Engaged in such concrete steps to write themselves into history, Schmitt depicted the Buribunks as a group driven by the urge “to immortalize oneself.”3 Insofar as they were preoccupied with preserving their life stories for posterity, the Buribunks constitute a striking entrance point to the questions concerning strategies for posthumous recognition and capturing future commemorative attention I explore in this study. These self-historicizing characters accordingly exemplify the logic of Zygmunt Bauman’s later maxim that “[f]uture immortality will grow of today’s recordings.” More specifically, they illustrate the aggressively opportunistic conditions for the production of lasting value implied by Bauman’s vision, given that “[t]omorrow’s immortals must first get hold of today’s archives.”4 1 This particular term was coined by Schmitt in the satirical tale, “The Buribunks: A Historico- Philosophical Meditation”: Carl Schmitt, “Die Buribunken: Ein geschictsphilosophischer Versuch,” SUMMA 1: 4 (1918): 89–106. The only English translation of this early and relatively obscure Schmitt text, where I first encountered the Buribunks and from which I cite here, is in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 231–42 (232). While my focus is upon the self-monumentalizing impulses of the Buribunks, the satire provides