Narrative Objects: Decorative Art in the Museum and the Novel, 1850-1880. Jacqueline YaUop Submitted for the degree of PhD, Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Department of English Literature. January 2006. Abstract: In the face of financial disaster, Dr Lydgate attempts to share his concerns with his wife, Rosamund, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871). Rosamund's refusal to engage with the crisis, or to sympathise with her husband's despair, is repeatedly presented by Eliot as a preoccupation with inanimate, decorative objects: Rosamund 'turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece'. 1 The mid- nineteenth-century novel increasingly explores what it means to own, collect and display objects, and how personal and public lives can be constructed and defined by 'things'. Recent critical discussion has examined the significance of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the subsequent international exhibitions, as a catalyst for, and an expression of, new ways of producing and consuming objects. 2 These dazzling exhibitions, in conjunction with the foundation of the South Kensington Museum (1857), began to formulate principles of design and models of taste for the public. Increasingly influential, however, was the development of the smaller, regional museum collections of decorative objects which began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most of these shared with their national counterparts an intention to educate the public; almost all retained 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 612. 2 See, for example, Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) and Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). the intimacy and distinct authoring of their roots with local collectors. This thesis draws together common impulses from real and fictional evidence to suggest ways in which people's relationships to their objects were becoming increasingly sophisticated and intimate. It explores the growing role of local municipal museums in presenting manufactured and decorative pieces, in reinforcing moral and social messages around collecting and display, and in popularising decorative 'things' in the home and beyond, while also examining the growing fictional fascination with, and the increasing visibility of, objects in the novel. Contents: Introduction p.l Chapter 1: Writing the Museum: p.20 The Union of the Useful with the Beautiful. Chapter 2: Objects for Posterity: p.55 Personal Meanings and Public Museums. Chapter 3: The Taste for Display: p.100 Objects on Show in Public and Private. Chapter 4: Displaying the Self: p.131 The Fictional Object Concealed and Revealed. Chapter 5: 'A Panorama in a Pillbox': p.155 Ruskin and the St George's Museum, Sheffield. Chapter 6: Objects of Desire: p.208 Collecting Things and the Challenge ofIdentity. Epilogue: p.246 List of Illustrations: Figure 1: 'The Ladies and the Police: p.108 The Battle of the Crystal Palace.' Punch, 20 (May 1851), p.202. Figure 2: The Long Gallery, Nottingham, 1878. p.118 Figure 3: The Long Gallery, Nottingham, 1878. p.l18 Figure 4: Emerald, uncut. p.185 Figure 5: Thomas Matthews Rooke: p.l85 Study ofan Elm Tree Trunk watercolour, and body colour on paper, 1869. Figure 6: John Wharlton Bunney: p.189 Fa~ade ofSt Mark's, Venice oil on canvas, 1877-82. Figure 7: William Gershom Collingwood: p.198 The Head ofIlaria di Caretto, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 1882. Figure 8: Frank Randal: p.198 Study ofa Capital, St. Lazare, Avallon, watercolour on paper, 1882. Figure. 9: J.C. Annytage after John Ruskin: p.198 Aspen Unidealized, Modern Painters, Volume 4, plate 28 Intaglio Print on paper, c.1856. Figure 10: 'Chronic Chinamania (Incurable)': p.223 Punch, 'Almanack' 1875.68 (17 December 1874). 'Do you mean that without my bibelots I'm nothing?'· • Ned Rosier in Henry James, The Portrait ofa Lady ed. by Nicola Bradbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.562. INTRODUCTION Ned Rosier, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, was not alone in fearing that he might be 'nothing' without his 'bibelots'. By the 1880s the complex relationship between a person and his objects - fictional or otherwise - was seen to express a range of private and public meanings. In the thirty years since the Great Exhibition in London, objects had become more and more visible and significant both in fictional texts and in the lives of their readers. Selfbood was being increasingly constructed, defined and interpreted through the collection and display of things. With the growth of commercial displays locally, nationally and internationally; the taste for domestic interiors decorated with an eclectic array of objects; the emergence of a network of local museums and the popularity of a realist fiction which used the concrete detail provided by objects to root characterisations, ideas and environments, the life of things had never been richer. As a contributor to the Magazine of Art noted in 1880, decorative art was both 'important' and 'omnipresent' and the fashionable world of the educated middle and wealthy classes was gripped by 'the innate and seemingly irreversible passion for display,.1 The core of this thesis grew out of the years I spent working as a curator with the Guild of St George Collection in Sheffield. Created by John Ruskin during the 1870s for the artisan workmen of the city, the collection is an attractive and varied mix of natural history, painting, drawing and photography, books, manuscripts, 1 Lewis F. Day, 'Decorative Art I', Magazine ofArt, 3 (1880), 103-7 (p.107). 2 plastercasts, coms and objects.2 It was, and remains, an inspiring educational resource and, while Ruskin may not be the most consistent or reliable of museum guides, his museological experiment was rooted in principles which are still considered important by curators today: physical and intellectual immediacy of the collection; opportunities for close study and contextual research; sensory stimulation. The collecting and display of objects within a museum was for Ruskin a way of initiating social reform and improving the intellectual and moral state of the public: 'The first function of a Museum ... is to give example of perfect order and perfect elegance,' he wrote in 1880, 'to the disorderly and rude populace,.3 It was also, and simultaneously, an opportunity for stimulating the imagination of visitors and nurturing new ways of seeing. The presentation of a variety of objects side by side within the museum environment was to encourage a visual literacy, 'patience in looking, and precision in feeling', which would transform the reading of the object into a reading of the natural, manmade and divine world.4 Ruskin's approach to his Guild of St George collection was essentially interdisciplinary. He wanted to illustrate to others the connections between things. Learning to look closely at an object, natural or manmade, was for Ruskin the first step in tracing correspondences which might ultimately bring a more refined understanding of the world: 'to see clearly,' he contended, 'is poetry, prophecy and religion, - all in one'.' While stopping short of prophecy, and barely touching on 2 Still owned by the Guild of St George, the collection is currently administer by Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, and is on display in the Millennium Galleries in the city centre. 3 John Ruskin, 'Picture Galleries: Their Function and Formation,' in The Works ofJohn Ruskin, ed. by E.T.Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library edition, 39 volumes (London: George Allen, 1903- 1912), 19, p.226. Further references to this edition will use the short title of Works. 4 John Ruskin, Praeterita, ed. by Kenneth Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.51. S John Ruskin, Modern Painters 1/1, in Works, 5, p.333. 3 poetry and religion, it is the spirit of this interdisciplinary, enquiring approach which I have adopted here in my examination of diverse material. As Ned Rosier's comment and Ruskin's Sheffield venture both demonstrate, the second half of the nineteenth century saw an increasing understanding, and interrogation, of how objects were used and enjoyed. Looking from fiction to museums and back again, my discussion considers the ways in which objects were simultaneously becoming more visible and expressive in a variety of spaces and roles: in the homes people were creating, in the museums they were visiting and in the fiction they were reading. Mid-Victorian fiction was frequently crammed full of objects in a way that had rarely been seen previously: the development of realist narratives relied, at least in part, on the specific physical detail which objects provided. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, fictional objects were doing more than simply providing the backdrop for convincing domestic settings. The recognition of the intimate bonds between individuals and their things was allowing fiction writers to explore the slippery relationship between an individual's sense of self and the outer signs they presented to others. As Ruskin demonstrated in his own work, the nineteenth-century exploration of visual stimuli was often deeply embedded in the structures and habits of literary discourse. Ruskin's varied interests - from the paintings of Turner to geology - and his eclectic way of approaching the world, were given unity and cohesion through the thirty-nine volumes of his written work. Elsewhere, the growing phenomenon of the object, its increasing role in creating and describing identity and its ability to contribute to, if not produce, personal narratives, meant that objects were also inhabiting a progressively more significant and complex role in 4 fiction of the period. By considering the portrayal of objects in journals, commentaries and advice handbooks, my thesis explores the widespread changing perceptions and use of objects.