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Curious Objects and Victorian Collectors: Men, Markets, Museums

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Curious Objects and Victorian Collectors: Men, Markets, Museums Curious Objects and Victorian Collectors: Men, Markets, Museums Submitted by Jessica Lauren Allsop to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in November 2013. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Abstract This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 2 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset. 3 Table of Contents Title Page 1 Abstract 2 Table of Contents 4 Introduction 6 Chapter One: Collection and Self-Destruction: Unsatisfying Masochism and Unproductive Gentlemanly Collecting. Introduction 46 Richard Marsh’s Curios and the Dilettanti 57 M.R. James and Antiquarian Societies 74 Vernon Lee and Historians 90 Conclusion: Needless Suffering? The Masochism of 102 Acquisition. Chapter Two: From Gentlemen to Madmen: Degenerating Collectors and Dangerous Things. Introduction 112 Collecting Mania in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady 122 Fetishism in Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the Iron Maid” 139 Bibliomania in George Gissing’s “Christopherson” 152 Conclusion: Moralising and the Pathological Collector? 163 Chapter Three: Collectors, Dealers, Desire and Dissemination: The Museum, the Market, and the Protean Unpredictability of Things. Introduction 171 “The Incident of the Private Bar”: Arthur Machen’s Mr. Burton, Agent for Curiosities. 181 The Jewel of Seven Stars: Bram Stoker’s Mr. Corbeck, Agent in the Field. 194 The Jewel of Seven Stars: Bram Stoker’s Mr. Trelawny, Scholar and Egyptologist. 206 “The Novel of the Black Seal”: Arthur Machen’s Professor Gregg, Ethnologist. 218 Conclusion. 231 4 Chapter Four: Contested Country House Collections: Legacy and Inheritance in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst,” Mary Cholmondeley’s “Sir Charles Danvers,” and Mary Ward’s The Mating of Lydia. Introduction 237 Part One - Country Houses and Collections: Lee, Cholmondeley, and Ward’s Legacies so far. Lee’s Okehurst: The Seamless Accumulation of Generations and an Impulse to Preserve. 251 Cholmondeley’s Vandon: A Deteriorated Inheritance 259 Ward’s Threlfall: A Fractured History and the Commencement of a Legacy? 266 Part Two - The Moment of Truth: Troubled Inheritance, Declining Estates, The Termination of a Legacy. Lee’s Overbearing History: Can Heritage be Mastered? 275 Cholmondeley’s Rejection of Faded Glory: Can History be Restored? 281 Ward’s Questionable Inheritance: Can We Pick and Choose the History Held in Things? 288 Conclusion. 296 Conclusion: The Curious Objects of Victorian Literature’s Collections. 302 Bibliography 311 5 Introduction On the twenty-first of March 1850, His Royal Highness the Prince Consort put forward his vision for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations. In his Mansion House speech he described how the “products of all quarters of the globe,” selected as “the best and the cheapest for our purposes,” would be placed at the public’s disposal (“Mansion House Speech” 61). Properly displayed within the space of the Exhibition, the exhibits would create “a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived” (61). These items would allow “every educated person” to fulfil their “duty,” namely to “watch and study the time in which he lives,” and “add his humble mite of individual exertion to further the accomplishment of what he believes Providence to have ordained” (59-60). The characteristics that defined the nineteenth century as an era of “competition and capital,” of “discovery” and “invention,” “publicity” and improvement, would make the agglomeration of objects particularly productive. As a result, the Exhibition would mobilise and classify objects from all corners of the world in order to reinforce a dominant world view of a global market with Britain at its heart, mastering material culture. Behind the idea of the Great Exhibition of 1851 lay the surety that material culture could be amassed, displayed, and deployed so as to reinforce British identity and advance an increasingly global economy. The idea of the Exhibition testified to a moment of confidence in a Victorian culture of collecting, and a productive interrelation of man and material culture. This moment would see the birth of the museum, to use Tony Bennett’s phrase, and the rise of a commodity culture, as Thomas Richards describes. Yet, in its wake arose an interest in the successes and indeed failures of these nineteenth-century projects. Better known for his work as a logician and economist in publications through the 1860s to the 1880s, W. S. Jevons wrote between 1881 and 1882 on “The Use and Abuse of Museums.” He argued that, despite the fact that “public 6 Museums [had] existed […] for more than a century and a quarter” in many forms, in the absence of a managerial and analytical approach, by the last decades of the nineteenth century it was sadly “possible to show on psychological or other scientific grounds that much which has been done in the formation of Museums [was] fundamentally mistaken,” and that “favourable results” were achieved “more by good luck than good management” (53). Despite the central position of exhibition spaces and institutional collections in Victorian culture and society, the order and efficacy of these varying edifices was questionable. Subject-object relations were unstable, with the result that the volume and variety of objects might overwhelm viewers and baffle the efforts of exhibitors alike. This thesis analyses literature that evidences a move away from the moment of cultural confidence at mid-century, as propounded in Prince Albert’s plans for the Great Exhibition, and in the idea of the modern market and the museum. It considers Richard Marsh’s “The Adventure of the Pipe” (1891) and “The Adventure of Lady Wishaw’s Hand” (1895), M.R. James’s “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (1895, 1904) and “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” (1919), Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” (1887, 1890) and “Oke of Okehurst” (1886, 1890), Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the Iron Maid” (1890), “The Incident of the Private Bar” and “Novel of the Black Seal,” both taken from The Three Imposters (1895), George Gissing’s “Christopherson” (1902), Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), Mary Cholmondeley’s Sir Charles Danvers (1889), and Mary Ward’s The Mating of Lydia (1913). These canonical and non-canonical novels and short stories testify to a late-Victorian and Edwardian literary imaginary haunted by curious objects and emasculated collectors that trouble relations to material things. In contrast to the confident object relations that the Exhibition, the museum and the market promoted, the literature that this study examines indicates a preoccupation with the instability of 7 objects, and a concern with masculine identities founded on differing forms of material mastery. In a number of texts not typically read as Gothic or for their objects, curious material things arise to challenge, confront, resist, and betray their possessors. Francis Bacon described objects in “The Praise of Knowledge” as providers of “knowledge itself, unadulterated and unmediated (515). If, after the manner of Baconian thought, enlightened modes of nineteenth century collecting privileged the object for this
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