Museum Culture, Edwardianism & Modernism

Ruth Hoberman opens her absorbing and original study on the complex interconnections between English museum culture and Edwardian fiction with a curiously trenchant story from the Times. On 24 February 1909, in the Arctic Room of the National Portrait Gallery, a seventy-year-old man shot his wife in the head before turning the gun on himself. To the horror of the Gallery's trustees, who later filed a complaint, the London Metropolitan Police carried the bodies, dripping blood, to the main entrance of the museum's East Wing, instead of by a private stairway. The public nature of the murder/suicide in a room full of portraits of "heroic imperialists" and the consternation of museum officials point to the vulnerability of the museum—an almost sacred space, firmly associated with the consolidation of British national identity, the regulation of civil behavior, and the ordered presentation of artifacts in gilt frames and glass cases—to the unruly subjectivities of actual museumgoers.

Richly situated in the context of museum history and the wide-ranging public debates about art and acquisition, value and authenticity, class, gender, and public ownership, this book focuses on the fascinating and varied representations of these subjectivities in fiction between 1890 and 1914. Hoberman argues that turn-of-the-century writers deployed the museum encounter to think about issues that were to become central to high modernists such as Yeats, Joyce, and Woolf: the nature of aesthetic experience, the relationship with the past, the problem of knowledge, introspection and the epiphanic moment. Her analyses range widely, and fruitfully, across literary genres, from popular works by E. Nesbit, M. R. James, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Guy Boothby, to writers who aimed at a more educated audience—Henry James, Vernon Lee, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster. The book weaves analyses of these narratives with heated public conversations among museum professionals, art critics, and journalists about the role of the museum in civil life, the cultivation of public taste, the art market, and the imperial enterprise.

One of the most interesting treatments of the ways in which museum controversies were filtered through contemporary fiction is in chapter two, "The Mind behind the Museum." Hoberman examines the "art-drain rhetoric" of the early 1900s, when aristocrats feeling the pinch were forced to part with their collections. "By 1913," she writes, "Britain had lost fifty Rembrandts, twenty-one Rubenses, five Velasquezes, eleven Holbeins, and seven Vermeers to the United States and Germany." These perceived economic defeats linked art unequivocally with a bolstering of national identity, and in 1903 the National Gallery created a National Art Collections Fund to solicit donations to buy masterpieces from private hands before they went on the international market. As Hoberman explains, the Rokeby Venus—Velasquez's The Toilet of Venus, housed at the Duke of Norfolk's Rokeby Hall—was saved for the nation in 1905 through donations to the Fund (along with money from the government and a big chunk from J. P. Morgan). The fate of masterpieces such as the Rokeby Venus and Holbein's Princess Christina (rescued by £40,000 from an anonymous female donor in 1909) also raised questions about the need for trained professionals who would decide on the value and authenticity of works of art, and the importance of finding—if necessary, fabricating—a national audience for these works. Hoberman concludes with a discussion of James's last novel, The Outcry (1911), which, situated within the art-drain panic, raised two essential questions without resolving them: who will rescue the art for the nation, and exactly who is "the nation" that will consume the art?

The Outcry, The High Bid, and The Golden Bowl, along with Conan Doyle's "The Story of the Jew's Breastplate" (1899), E. Nesbit's The Story of an Amulet (1905), and May Sinclair's The Divine Fire (1904), self-consciously engage in national arguments about collectors and curators, market pricing and priceless masterpieces, and Hoberman's overview of...