Introduction: Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century

A Mr Childers bought the tree against which Wellington stood at Waterloo, they must have it to themselves, they must cut it up for their fire sides, & shew it to their Christmas parties. Oh England, never were such a people. On every English chimney piece, you will see a bit of the real Pyramids, a bit of Stonehenge! a bit of the first cinder of the first fire Eve ever made, a bit of the very fig leaf which Adam first gave her. You can't admit the English into your gardens but they will strip your trees, cut their names on your statues, eat your fruit, & stuff their pockets with bits for their musaeums. Of course, the English in the nineteenth century were hardly the only ones beset by such an impulse. Nor was that impulse especially novel—to continue the biblical lineage Haydon grumpily invokes, Noah has been seen as the first collector (Stewart 1984, 152), his Ark the embodiment of "all the themes of collecting itself: desire and nostalgia, saving and loss, the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time" (Elsner and Cardinal 1994a, 1).1 Yet Haydon's private tirade does capture the complex, constitutive role that collecting played in the various networks that structured nineteenth-century existence. Collectors could bring foreign wars home to domestic fire sides, and they were just as likely to inhabit gardens as they were galleries. British collectors fanned out across the globe, subsuming art and nature as the thick, intangible reality of history was literally commodified, dubiously expatriated as so many trinkets and curios. Haydon himself was not immune to this distinctive English malady: the plaint in his journal was linked to his own art's exclusion from the king's personal collection (Haydon 1990, 122–124). If collecting was a disease, it was an especially communicable one. Two decades ago, Literature Compass was conceived as "a navigational aid for finding your way across the living map of a discipline." From the outset, the journal's disciplinary map regarded the fields of Romanticism and Victorianism as two separate terrains. In the journal's recent redrawing, the new section designated "Nineteenth-Century Networks" reflects a desire for broader conversations responsive to the collaborative, global, boundary-crossing work that has reshaped both fields and expanded their shared terrain. This special issue of essays surveys that terrain by focusing on collecting, collections, and collectors in the long nineteenth century, a period when collecting, broadly speaking, "became more diverse, more specialized, more popular, and more taxonomic" (Belk 1995, 46). In returning to a nexus of topics that has been important to the state-of-the-field remit of Literature Compass from early on, we hope to give fresh energy to longstanding topics and open up new paths of exploration across our various fields of inquiry.2 Collecting is at once a material and intellectual practice and an object of investigation. To query the multifarious life of collecting in the nineteenth century is to think anew about consumption and classification, desire and discipline, trend and taxonomy. It is to wonder at the sheer profusion of objects deemed worthy of accumulation in the period—from fossils to ferns to furniture, shells to seaweed to stamps, coins to crystals to colonial curios—and to ponder approaches to organizing, arranging, and displaying that profusion. It is to contemplate the material traces of a global empire brought home for public exhibition in galleries and museums, but also to plumb the private realm of idiosyncratic expression, compulsion, and self-fashioning. As many of the essays gathered here imply, the organization inherent in collection almost always carries an affective charge. Mania and memorabilia are seldom far apart in the nineteenth century, an era crowded with notable collectors whose bequests helped to establish storied public museums and galleries.3 If collection points forward to renewal and revivification, its practices also speak to the limits of historicism and a rearward gaze. In the terms of Susan Stewart's On Longing, a touchstone for many studies on these topics, "the collection replaces origin with classification, thereby making temporality a spatial and material phenomenon" (1984, 153). As a subfield that investigates "order beyond the realm of temporality" (Stewart 1984, 151) and thus transects a range of disciplines, including museum studies and the sociology of taste and connoisseurship, collecting has blossomed into a self-conscious area of study with its own organizations (notably the Society for the History of Collecting), its own dedicated venues for research (foremost among them the Journal of the History of Collections, in print since 1989), and its own extensive bibliography.4 In literary studies, collecting has been vital to new work that expands the remit of methods like book history, material culture, media studies, speculative realism, critical imperial studies, and literature and science. And in nineteenth-century studies in particular, collecting has formed a key motif in approaches to history, literature, and culture that have seized on the conceptual energy of things and relics, souvenirs and keepsakes—the rich plenum of Romantic and Victorian materiality.5 Fresh reappraisals of the literary canon stand as a reminder that our own collective practices, as well as the institutions, anthologies, and digital platforms that mediate them, must also be constantly reappraised. New imperatives to describe and display underline how the methods of collection and curation might be revived in the present, leading to alternative models of collaboration in and beyond the academy—for instance, between researchers and museum professionals—and different ways of reading objects.6 Addressing the intersection of collecting with empire, material culture, natural history, and the origins and organization of museums, the essays in our special issue canvas the various modalities of collecting as practice, poetics, and politics, to use Susan Pearce's (1995, 28–33) influential taxonomy, and point to several intriguing possibilities for such methodological reanimation. Margaret Gray's essay begins by countering the prevailing assumption that most British enthusiasts for Japanese art in the nineteenth century were men. Gray surveys the travel writings of several women who visited Japan shortly after it was opened to trade and tourism from Britain in 1859. The essay foregrounds questions about genre as well as the gendered dynamics of collecting, an area of compelling recent work.7 While male collectors—branded "connoisseurs"—often benefited from the imprimatur of institutions and their correspondent social networks, female collectors were easily dismissed as "amateurs"—enthusiasts whose interest in lacquerware and porcelain was linked to the decorative rather than the fine arts. Gray's examination of travelogues by figures like Anna d'Almeida, Alice Frere, Isabella Bird, and Mary Bickersteth shows how travel writing offered women a path "to circumvent institutional and social barriers" while also affording a public forum for the demonstration of their own technical expertise and connoisseurship (p. 4). Indeed, Gray notes that "women were among the earliest Victorians to publish information on identifying, sourcing, and evaluating Japanese pottery and lacquerware" (p. 6). Women were not mere consumers but collectors whose writings were pivotal to early anthropological efforts to understand (and preserve) the traditional culture of Japan in the face of its rapid industrialization. In showing how women's travelogues operated as "legitimate sites of public knowledge formation" (p. 10), Gray's work raises important questions about how genre mediated an ever-expanding horizon of material culture in Victorian Britain. In her essay, Alice Little turns from connoisseurs at the far corner of empire to the many musicians in eighteenth-century England who compiled the tunes they played in militia bands, at country dances or country churches, or by their own domestic hearths into pocket-sized tunebooks. While historians have tended to explain tunebooks in light of their function, Little argues that a diachronic approach steeped in material culture and biography reveals music collecting as an "intellectual practice" (p. 1), illuminating the deep interest in selection, curation, and organization that many compilers brought to their tunes over the course of a long life—or even lives. Looking particularly at the English tunebooks of John Malchair, Little considers how headings, marginalia, added pages, and impromptu indexes point toward a deep interest in the collection and categorization of tunes a century before folk song collecting became a Victorian preoccupation. Indeed, as the Act of Union redefined British identity, the airs collected in eighteenth-century tunebooks displayed a new cognizance of national and regional difference. As Little puts it, "the compilers of tunebooks ordered their worlds through their collections" (p. 4). Though hand-copied compilations like Malchair's could often be traced back to printed collections, the mysterious criteria by which single texts or tunes were joined together as a book would become all the more pressing as pocket-sized manuscript books gave way to an era of print. Two essays in this special issue intersect with the formidable literature on collecting and collections in the context of the nineteenth-century sciences, in particular natural history.8 Lindsay Wells first considers that bulwark of colonial agriculture, tobacco, to which garden writers in the nineteenth century accorded aesthetic value, deeming it an exquisite ornamental border flower or a suitable neighbor to zinnias and chrysanthemums. "Tobacco is by no means an ugly plant," as an issue of The Midland Florist and Suburban Horticulturalist noted in 1856: "it reminds one of a sunflower" (quoted on p. 11). Wells considers not just the botanists and amateur gardeners who approached the garden as a proxy for empire, but also the rapid expansion of the horticultural press that turned enthusiastic cultivators into imperial collectors. At the same time, she argues that the translation from colonial crop into garden ornament often involved the suppression of the slave labor that made tobacco available for British consumers. While cultivators and illustrators entertained the fantasy that tobacco could be aestheticized, with the labor and real conditions of tobacco plantations "relegated to the sidelines" (p. 11), Wells takes these displacements as a sign that even the most domesticated natural places reflected the contradictions of empire. Her specific account of the profusion of tobacco in British gardens raises larger questions about how print culture, illustration techniques, rhetorical protocols, and even generic expectations effect a sleight of hand, one that promised to insulate plant collectors from their complicity with the "racial dynamics of colonial agriculture" (p. 2). Sophia Franchi's essay turns from the consequential protocols of botanical illustration to emphasize the legacy of a particular botanical illustrator, Anna Atkins, whose Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions has been described as the first photographically illustrated book. While scholarship tends to characterize Atkins as either affirming or subverting the "scientific visual culture of her mid-century Victorian moment" (p. 4), Franchi disrupts this binary to align Atkins with Talia Schaffer's (2011) account of Victorian handicraft, a cultural practice that enabled its practitioners "to articulate a complex relationship to the industrial era and the mass-produced commodity, a relationship compounded of both participation and critique" (p. 7). In this vein, the cyanotypes in Photographs of British Algae seem less the products of an enthusiastic amateur than the productions of a creator attuned to the allure of mechanical objectivity. At the same time, Atkins's impressions also veer away from objectivity or passive observation to capture on paper an ontological encounter of self and world. In Franchi's terms, Atkins's collection of botanical prints capture "a moment of generative interchange with the world" that "blurs perception and creation, representation and collection" (p. 10). Her early foray into photography thus skirted certain ideals of mimetic realism and mechanical objectivity to illuminate, however oddly, the thing itself. A pair of essays address the politics at stake in nineteenth-century museum collections and curatorial practices. Both contribute—albeit with different aims and methods—to scholarship on the colonial entanglement of museums and exhibitions.9 Indeed, Lindsey Chappell's essay opens with a survey of the vast array of recent scholarship attuned to how "the museum evolves in and through nineteenth-century empire" (p. 4), and subsequently considers the museum's literary function as not just a site or setting but a form capable of structuring narrative and curating feeling. In her terms, the uptick of museums featured in poetry and prose throughout the nineteenth century points to the "growing awareness of their capacity to direct meaning" (p. 4). The literary examples she entertains—stretching from a poem by William Thackeray to crucial scenes in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—foreground a "dynamic human component within museum form" (p. 7) by tracing not only the influence and ideology baked into imperializing museums but also the ability of characters to act in opposition to that ideology. For Chappell, however, the museum's influence stretches well beyond character. The formal logic of the museum is recapitulated by the formal logic of the text itself, such that a reader can't easily follow a character like Elizabeth Bennet or Lucy Snowe in their resistance to the museum's hierarchical or teleological ordering. In this sense, the ultimate upshot of Chappell's essay is a pedagogical vision of how literary study might make students sharper readers of the museums they experience as well as of the proliferating digital exhibits that emulate them. Approaching the imperializing logic of museums more obliquely, Sezen Ünlüönen reads the Ottoman Imperial Museum against the grain of its most prominent exegesis. While scholars have tended to see this museum as a project in Westernization—"a strategic tool for the Ottoman bid to a European identity, through adoption of European practices" (p. 2)—she focuses on the more obscure power dynamics activated by the museum's many departures from standard European practice. At the same time, Ünlüönen notes—in keeping with recent trends in museum studies—that while institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre loom large in studies of the period, most nineteenth-century museums were chaotic and even carnivalesque.10 Idiosyncratically ordered and largely unconcerned with disciplining visitors, colonial museums and other local collections became places in which the "forces of order and systematization were engaged in a constant battle with chaos and the idiosyncrasies of desire" (p. 4). The Ottoman Imperial Museum was no exception to this more capacious sense of what a collection might entail. In fact, Ünlüönen argues that it represents a case in which the aspiration to systematic, scientific collection resulted not in imperial power, but in imperial powerlessness. The final two essays move to consider self-reflexive questions about collecting as a material and affective practice, and about collections and their contemporary (especially digital) display. Tim Sommer's exploration of the "auratic" character of literary manuscripts revisits a prominent vein of recent scholarship that approaches Romanticism as a cultural formation fashioned by Victorian collectors. As such, the essay raises a central question that stretches across the nineteenth century: how is the canon itself formed and deformed by the tensions inherent in collection? Returning to this moment of retrospective periodization and consolidation, Sommer argues that the material traces of an author's own writing—manuscripts, letters, and even autographs—appealed to collectors as a convergence point or "interface" between "the writing body and the written corpus" (pp. 2–3). But the increasing allure of autographs and other objects of literary collecting only amplified a paradox: intimate, embodied traces of authorial existence were quickly becoming hot commodities. Sommer's essay thus touches on a noted feature of how collections acquire their "quality of separateness" through the "sacred-making process of selection": by a process akin to the sacralization of religious relics, objects move "from the profane—the secular world of mundane, ordinary commodity—to the sacred, taken to be extraordinary, special and capable of generating reverence" (Pearce 1995, 24–25). Turning to the fiction of Henry James, Sommer considers how the close proximity of sacred relic and economic transaction could distort "the consciousness of the collector" (p. 7), and yet his essay ends with another emergent transformation: the twilight of the intimate collector and the consequential rise of collecting at an institutional scale. Can a personal encounter with the literary past outlast the age of institutional taxonomy? As co-editors of the Victorian Jewish Writers Project, Brandon Katzir and Linsday Katzir explore collection and canonization not through the consolidation of material objects in institutions, but through the curation of texts in a digital archive. In attempting to make the outsized impress of Victorian Jews on modernity more legible, Katzir and Katzir contribute to the "curatorial turn" (p. 3) in Victorian studies by reclaiming Jewish texts from what Franco Moretti (2013, 45) has called "the great unread."11 Their essay discusses the early rationale for the VJWP as well as its evolution over time and across platforms. Drawing on Bruno Latour's (2005) actor-network theory to raise complex questions about mediation, inclusion criteria, and access, they consistently focus on "the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives" (p. 2). In the wider subfield, Latour's theory has been seen as "providing a potent alternative framework for understanding how collections generate meaning, allowing histories of collecting to de-centre the collector as a transcendent organizational force," and instead to conceive of "collections as dynamic networks of interrelations" (Burgess 2021, 112–113). For Katzir and Katzir, an actor-network approach to the mechanics of collecting similarly indicates that those who access a collection—readers and users, in their case—shape its meaning as fluidly as the collector whose ambition or desire originally aggregates items or objects. In this sense, the Victorian Jewish Writers Project suggests that most nineteenth-century collections are still ripe for reassemblage and reappraisal. Indeed, anyone stumbling on this special issue of "Nineteenth-Century Networks"—a collection of essays about collection—is perfectly positioned to continue this interpretive work.