'THE HOARDING SENSE': HOARDING in AUSTEN, TENNYSON, DICKENS, and NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE by NICOLE CATHERINE LOBDELL (Und
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‘THE HOARDING SENSE’: HOARDING IN AUSTEN, TENNYSON, DICKENS, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE by NICOLE CATHERINE LOBDELL (Under the Direction of Richard Menke) ABSTRACT This project analyzes the roles hoarding played in nineteenth-century culture and fiction. Many scholars of the nineteenth century are interested in the roles things and material culture play in the literature of the period, but there are no contemporary studies of hoarding before the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century hoarder appears at the intersection of two other popular nineteenth-century cultural and literary phenomena: the miser and the collector. But the hoarder does not fit fully into either category, and so the lines between miser, hoarder, and collector blur in nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction. I demonstrate the nineteenth century’s interest in hoarding by uncovering a variety of historical anecdotes in the form of biographies and periodical accounts that reveal how the period interpreted hoarding. I then examine the role of hoarding in the works of three canonical authors, Jane Austen, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. I consider how each author uses hoarding as a metaphor for other concerns, such as the building of domestic spaces, mourning, and the changing relationships between people and things. Ultimately, I suggest the presence of hoarding in nineteenth-century literature and culture burdens the present-day scholar and curator with the anxiety deciding how to interpret the historical importance of physical objects that possess little to no historical or monetary value. INDEX WORDS: Hoarding, Hoarders, Misers, Lumber, England, Nineteenth Century, Romantic, Victorian, Novel, Jane Austen, Letters, Emma, Mansfield Park, Nests, Home, Domestic, Charles Dickens, The Great Exhibition, A Christmas Carol, “Bill-Sticking,” Bleak House, Crystal Palace, Houses of Parliament, Lord Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Melancholy, Fragments ‘THE HOARDING SENSE’: HOARDING IN AUSTEN, TENNYSON, DICKENS, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE by NICOLE CATHERINE LOBDELL B.A., Rhodes College, 2005 M.A., University of Georgia, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 © 2013 Nicole Catherine Lobdell All Rights Reserved ‘THE HOARDING SENSE’: HOARDING IN AUSTEN, TENNYSON, DICKENS, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE by NICOLE CATHERINE LOBDELL Major Professor: Richard Menke Committee: Roxanne Eberle Douglas Anderson Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2013 iv DEDICATION For my parents, Kim and Julie, my brother, Casey, and my sister, Erin. In memory of Stanley Gene Badelt, who loved to read. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful beyond measure to Richard Menke for his support, guidance, and endurance through two degrees! He has made me a better scholar, writer, and teacher and given me the intellectual freedom to take risks and make mistakes without fear of judgment. Without his encouragement, patience, and forgiveness, I would not have finished this project. I owe an enormous amount of gratitude to Roxanne Eberle, who always offered a sympathetic ear and whom I consider much more than a mentor – she is a friend. This dissertation has benefitted immensely from the guidance of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who, even though he was tired of Dickens, mentored the Dickens chapter during my time at the University of Oxford, and reminded me why this project was special. Thank you to Doug Anderson, who challenged me to find the path not taken, and who first got me excited about the possibilities of hoarding. To the University of Oxford English D.Phils, Erin Johnson, Laura Ludtke, and Rosie Lavan, for bringing me into their group and talking with me about hoarding, Dickens, and Austen over pints at the Turf and the White Horse. I also owe a special thanks to the librarians at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library at Colindale, and the Bodleian Library for their help in locating materials. Many thanks are due to Jamie McClung and the UGA at Oxford program for allowing me the time and resources to do research in Oxford and London, and a huge thanks to Barbara Bradshaw, who not only kept me sane but who allowed me to convince her to drive us to see a nineteenth-century hoarder’s home in Oxfordshire. Thanks to the members of NAVSA who have allowed me to present some of these ideas at their annual conference. vi I am so thankful to all my fellow English Ph.D.s, who have traveled this long road with me: Emily Kane, Annalee Edmondson, Rosemary Luttrell, Elizabeth Steere, Lisa Bolding, Laurie Norris, Beth Beggs, Jenn Blair, and Miranda Yaggi. A heartfelt thanks to Tricia Lootens, JoEllen Childers, Dash, and Kidron, who not only offered me a writing sanctuary in their home but also made me part of their pack. Thanks to Casie Legette for her support. I was so lucky to meet at AP grading Amy King, who is always ready to laugh about ghost mimes over wine and guacamole. To my lifelong friends, Alison Trendell, Margo Smith, and Morgan McCrary, who remind me that there is a world outside academia. Many special thanks to my extended family including the Lobdells, Badelts, Flynns, Smiths, Kochers, Dillerees, and Russos. Lastly, thanks to my sister Erin, who likes to remind me that she finished college and culinary school in the time it has taken me to complete this degree; my brother Casey and sister- in-law Michele, who always make me laugh; and to Oscar and Scooby, who always let me know when it’s time to take a break. Finally, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my mother and father, who have shown me what real love, trust, loyalty, sacrifice, and commitment look like. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ v CHAPTERS 1 Introduction: ‘Distinct Disorder’ ................................................................................. 1 2 ‘Towards a Nest of My Own’: Hoarding in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Emma ............................................. 31 3 ‘The Hoarding Sense’: Memory and Melancholy in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H.. .......... 82 4 An ‘Obstinate Adherence to Rubbish’: Hoarding and Charles Dickens ................................................................................. 113 5 Coda: The Legacy of Hoarding ................................................................................. 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 160 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: “DISTINCT DISORDER” “Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp." - Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain When the Victorian landscape painter J. M. W. Turner died in December 1851 “in an obscure lodging and under an assumed named,” the task of cataloguing the contents of his studio fell to writer and art critic John Ruskin (Leeds 12). What Ruskin discovered shocked him: “In seventeen boxes . I found upwards of 19,000 pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another. Many on both sides. Some with four, five, or six subjects on each side” (qtd. in Thornbury 311). Realizing the extent and pathetic condition of Turner’s artistic remains, Ruskin laments his findings: The best book of studies for his great shipwrecks contained about a quarter of a pound of chalk débris. Others in ink, rotted into holes. Others (some splendid- coloured drawings among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges . Others worm-eaten; some mouse-eaten; many torn half-way through . Dust of thirty years’ accumulation, black, dense, and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed and crumpled edges. (311-12) The image Ruskin creates of Turner’s hoarded artwork crumbling into dust endows the scene with a pathos not always found in the descriptions of hoarders and their treasures. It would take 2 Ruskin almost a full year to examine the “100 oil paintings” and “nearly 20,000 . drawings and unfinished sketches” (Leeds 12). The year prior to his death, Turner had held his last showing at the Royal Academy, and news of the newly discovered hoard of artwork fired the country’s imagination about the man behind the art. Following his death, The Leeds Mercury published an article titled “The Turner Pictures” discussing the fate of his artwork: “Men said that the Great Master [Turner] . was a penurious and cold hearted miser, and that in him were strangely combined an ardent passion for the sublime and beautiful in nature, and an absorbing love for gold—that his genius was chiefly valuable to him as it could be coined into hard cash” (12). The reporter suggests that these sorts of statements are false, and that Turner “was no vulgar hoarder of money,—at all events that his pictures held first place in his regard” (12). The writer presents Turner as an artist who treasured his work over any sum of money, choosing to hoard his art rather than sell “the children of his genius” (12). Walter Thornbury’s 1862 biography The Life of J. M. W. Turner, which is largely a collection of anecdotes, statements, and letters given to the author by the artist’s friends, offers a competing and controversial view of Turner. In it, David Roberts, the Scottish