The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (review)

As if sending a charge of electromagnetism, the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley turned the poet's possessions into objects of attraction. Shelley's materials, indeed his material remains, became collectibles. We see this charge of desire in a letter, dated 14 January 1872, from Richard Garnett, assistant Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, to writer and editor William Michael Rossetti, a brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina. In the letter Garnett mused on a copy of Fraser's Magazine that he thought might contain an "early history of Shelley" and then said: "Trelawny has a piece of Shelley's jawbone—charred of course—wh. he showed me. Oh that it were mine one day! I wd. imitate 'the priests of the bloody faith' and enshrine it" (Letters about Shelley Interchanged by Three Friends—Edward Dowden, Richard Garnett, and Wm. Michael Rossetti, 1917, 43). Self-mocking in tone, but also exploding with enthusiasm, the letter nonetheless demonstrates how collecting the remains of Shelley inspired religious devotion.

The impassioned collecting of Shelleyana opens Judith Pascoe's new book The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors. Edward Silsbee, an American collector, purchased Shelley's Italian guitar in 1898 and added it to his growing array of Shelley items, including "Shelley watch fobs and Shelley snuffboxes, a Shelley baby rattle and a Shelley raisin plate, Shelley hair and Shelley doodles" (1). In the pages that follow, Pascoe assembles materials about Romantic collecting, including chapters on Queen Charlotte's catalogues, Napoleon's and Byron's carriages, Belzoni's Egyptian ruins, and Mary Anning's fossils. Pascoe looks not only to collecting habits of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also to the responses of Victorians like Silsbee, who assembled the materials of the Romantic poets, as well as to the intellectual acquisitiveness of contemporary scholars who curate and may work to control how we imagine the Romantic era. And the book itself is so beautifully produced it has the aura of a collector's item.

Pascoe has done a brilliant job of gathering odd stories and has fractured them in compelling ways to introduce ideas about both the behaviors of collectors and collecting itself. Some of the book's most striking moments are in the strange and ironic details she pulls out of the past, like the fact that while Queen Charlotte's collections were sold off or destroyed, King George III's books were preserved and are now enshrined in the New British Library, or that Byron's carriage, a replica of Napoleon's, ended up parked next to a wayside inn and served as a chicken roost with, nonetheless, "'an aura of old romance'" (107). Although Pascoe's objects may have an inaccessible pastness, her painstaking efforts to include these objects in intricate narratives means that the stories themselves do not.

Pascoe's structure is not deep exploration and interpretation but display and association. Citing both Susan Stewart's On Longing and some of Walter Benjamin's essays as precursors to her style, Pascoe writes: "The fragmentary nature of my telling mirrors the fragmentary state of less well known collectors' surviving collections," emphasizing that her "structuring method underscores the idiosyncratic aspect" of the objects she examines (24). Therefore this is a book that gradually registers its importance—it accretes significance one collection at a time, fragment by fragment. For example, William Bullock, Curator of the London Museum and the "hummingbird collector" of the title, stands just out of the spotlight in each of Pascoe's fragments, giving each story a subtle associational anchor.

Using an inventive show-and-tell method, Pascoe, like Benjamin, presents facts, but is most interested in the juxtaposition that the facts generate. Her textured montage evokes rather than structures a sustained argument, and thus it provokes associative thinking. In her chapter on Queen Charlotte, for instance, Pascoe speculates that the Queen may have read most of...