BOFFIN's BOOKS and DARWIN's FINCHES: VICTORIAN CULTURES of COLLECTING by ©2006 Michael William Hancock M.A., Kansas State Unive
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BOFFIN'S BOOKS AND DARWIN'S FINCHES: VICTORIAN CULTURES OF COLLECTING By ©2006 Michael William Hancock M.A., Kansas State University, 1995 Submitted to the Department of English and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dorice Williams Elliott (Chairperson) Max Keith Sutton Marjorie Swann Date defended The Dissertation Committee for Michael W. Hancock certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: BOFFIN'S BOOKS AND DARWIN'S FINCHES: VICTORIAN CULTURES OF COLLECTING Committee: Dorice Williams Elliott (Chairperson) Max Keith Sutton Marjorie Swann Date approved ii ABSTRACT Michael W. Hancock, Ph.D. Department of English, University of Kansas December 2006 Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for acquisition and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning that was often represented in the literature of the age as a source of prestige and social legitimation. Through interdisciplinary readings of Victorian fiction, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, my study examines how textual representations of collecting helped to define nation, class, and gender in Britain from the 1830s to the turn of the century and beyond. Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, including approaches from museum studies, I explain how Victorian writing about collecting, from Charles Dickens's earliest works to fin-de-siècle lepidopteran narratives, participated in the formation of individual and collective identities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, prominent author-collectors asserted their specifically male authority and British dominion abroad through travel narratives about acquiring exotic artifacts for the nation or assembling proprietary collections exhibited back iii home. Meanwhile, Victorian novels included an array of collectors of all ranks, many of whom seek to enhance their professional or social status through their collections, which are often the products of competition or emulation. However, from mid- century on, a period in which museums proliferated and the British empire grew during the age of the New Imperialism, authors increasingly turned to the figure of the collector to convey anxieties about habits of consumption that threatened personal identity or social stability and a world of objects that were not necessarily under the consumer's control. Thus, even as collecting helped to order knowledge, material culture, and social relations in nineteenth-century Britain, it also posed certain challenges to the social identities and forms of subjectivity the Victorians attempted to forge for themselves, as their collections and texts show. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A project of this nature and scope is necessarily the work of many hands. I wish to thank those whose interest, encouragement, and support helped me throughout my research and writing. A Graduate Honors Fellowship from the University of Kansas and several awards from the Department of English provided generous financial support for my doctoral study. My interest in Victorian material culture was sparked by a terrific June 1995 seminar on empire and sexuality from visiting professor Nancy Armstrong of Brown University. I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee members, Dorice Williams Elliott, Max Sutton, and Marjorie Swann, for their enthusiasm, expertise, good humor, and patience during our journey together. Richard Clement, who heads the Department of Special Collections at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas, helped to make available many rare books and taught me about the history of the book as a material object; Angela Richardson and Chris Jocius of the Information Resource Center at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy kept me supplied with interlibrary loan books and other sources in the final stages of my writing. My parents, Marjorie and Bill, introduced me to the wonders of books and England at an early age and provided considerable financial and emotional support throughout my years as a graduate student; this dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my father. Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Cathy, for her faith in me and her understanding, without which this would not have been possible. v Chapter Four, "The Stones in the Sword: Tennyson's Crown Jewels," previously appeared in Victorian Poetry 39 (2001): 1-24 and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Victorian Poetry and West Virginia University Press. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One Layard's Assyria and Cumming's Africa: Travel 17 Narratives and Imperial Exhibitions at Mid-Century Chapter Two Dickens and the Exhibitionary Complex 77 Chapter Three Mid-Victorian Pathologies of Collecting 128 Chapter Four The Stones in the Sword: Tennyson's Crown Jewels 177 Chapter Five Aurelians Abroad: Literary Lepidoptery at the Fin de 211 Siècle Conclusion 262 Notes 266 Works Cited 296 vii Introduction Four years before the anatomist Richard Owen coined the word "dinosaur" (Ashworth 4), the British Museum's geological curator George Richardson1 documented the "unrivalled" private collection of his friend and former patron, the great fossil-hunter Gideon Mantell (220), in his second series of Sketches in Prose and Verse (1838). Richardson describes the Mantellian Museum at Brighton, where he had served as curator, as a formative influence on the developing and increasingly prestigious sciences of geology and paleontology: "[T]he exhibition of this Museum has more widely diffused a taste for these pursuits, and made more geologists, than any similar establishment extant" (3). According to Richardson's estimate, Mantell's two-story museum consisted of some twenty to thirty thousand specimens, including the famed Maidstone Iguanodon;2 "a series of fossils and minerals, illustrative of the geological structure of the coast of Sussex" (14); and various "antiquities of man" (198), from the spoils of the neighborhood's Saxon barrows to Norman architectural fragments from the "once splendid" Priory of Lewes (199). Mantell's accumulated evidence of extinct "monster[s]" (11) and lost civilizations and the impending dispersal of these material remains among the British Museum's collections prompted Richardson to assemble a permanent record of the Mantellian Museum, as if to preserve it against the very passage of time that it recorded. Besides presenting a verbal snapshot of the museum "in its present separate state" through a sequential narrative tour (4-27, 189-222), Richardson inserts his own 1 invented history of Mantell's antique Roman bronze Cupid alongside "various poetic tributes . paid to this collection" (222), including an anonymous sonnet to Mantell3 modeled upon Wordsworth's "London 1802" ode to Milton. Whereas Wordsworth invokes the epic poet's spirit to return and redeem a fallen England, the Mantellian sonnet celebrates the collector's achievement of fame within his lifetime and describes his "vast Museum" as his "monument" and secular "immortal shrine" (qtd. in Richardson 222). Besides reflecting the hagiographic tendencies of England's empirical and professionalized "Heroic Age of Geology" from 1830 to 1850 (Knell 305-36), Richardson's anthology, itself a collection, epitomizes the practice of textualizing collections in multiple genres and forms, a part of the broader early Victorian culture of collecting that raised the scientific collector-connoisseur Mantell "to a distinguished rank among the discoverers and philosophers of the age" (Richardson 3). The Victorians acknowledged collecting, in the sense of "the gathering together and setting aside of selected objects" (Pearce, On Collecting 3), as a defining characteristic of their times and even an essential component of British national identity. "This is a 'collecting' age," declared London's Graphic weekly in 1869: "Never was the vocation of the gatherer of curiosities more followed than at present. Not only pictures, prints, coins, birds, insects, and fishes are collected, but there are amateurs who form cabinets of postage-stamps, first numbers of periodicals, playbills, and street ballads" ("Her Majesty" 12). Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects 2 from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. For the Victorians, this distinctive and concentrated form of consumption manifested itself in both the public and private spheres, from the burgeoning institutions of the so-called Museum Age to the domestic interiors of the middle and upper classes. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for accumulation and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning. Perhaps nowhere was the Victorians' systematic urge to accumulate and organize the material culture of the past and present more evident than in the literature of the day. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, novelists such as Swift, Smollett, and