- Hummingbirds
Judith Pascoe quotes Walter Benjamin, writing in One-Way Street, 'when a valued, cultured and elegant friend sent me his new book and I was about to open it, I caught myself in the act of straightening my tie'. It's more likely that the reader of The Hummingbird Cabinet will feel like settling down on the sofa with a cup of coffee, having unloosened any constraining articles of formal wear. Despite Cornell's commercially-savvy production of the book, with its 'old-time' typography, its generous array of (black-and-white) illustrations, and its eye-catching hummingbird dust cover – and miniature hummingbird paragraph-break motifs – this isn't just another highbrow coffee-table book desperately seeking to interest readers beyond the narrow purlieus of academia.
Pascoe's study is concerned with the apparently antithetical relationship between the lure of collecting and poetry in the Romantic period; she sets out to discover why, at the moment when a Wordsworth or Shelley was celebrating the triumph of imagination over materiality, other contemporaries were obsessively pursuing the physical detritus of the poets and the age they inhabited. Men like the American sea captain Edward Silsbee, who travelled to Italy to interrogate the elderly Claire Claremont, Shelley's sisterin law and one-time lover (he is the prototype of Henry James's sinister collector in The Aspern Letters). In 1898 Silsbee purchased Shelley's guitar, which had been 'religiously preserved since (the poet's) death', and donated [End Page 265] it to the Bodleian Library in a bid to immortalize his own name in connection with his hero's. Do collectors of Silsbee's stamp really represent the 'materialistic alter ego' of the romantic poet, or is this just an early example of the fan-club phenomenon? Although the collectors discussed here are 'romantic' to the extent that they are denizens of the era conventionally described as such by literary and cultural historians, there may be something more to the epithet. The objects which they avidly sought are tokens or symbols of a totality never entirely recoverable except in imagination; the collector or viewer has to restore them to their field of meaning in order to render them fully intelligible, and by its very nature that is often a quixotic desire.
In contrast to Henry James (as well as theorists of collecting like Sigmund Freud, Jean Baudrillard, and Susan Stewart) Pascoe is drawn to the cultural modesty of Romantic collection, historically located between the precious rarities of the princely Wunderkammeren of the Renaissance, and the systematizing 'grand narrative' of the Victorian museum. While Freud and his disciples view the collector as a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, in full regression to the anal stage, Pascoe persuades us that men like Silsbee were 'less invested in the completion of a series or the construction of total order than in the pleasure of the systematizing, however doomed to ultimate failure' (p. 173). The psychoanalytical 'take' on collecting, she argues, lacks historical nuance, and besides, its obsession with phallus-substitutes makes it absurdly androcentric. To prove her point she introduces chapters on two women collectors at different ends of the social scale, Queen Charlotte (wife of the mad George III), and the humbly born palaeontologist Mary Anning. Walter Benjamin offers a more sympathetic model, with his fascination with the 'concreteness of an era', and his praise for the child-like quality of collecting in which 'the objects become launch pads for imaginative take-offs'.
Benjamin is also an alibi for The Hummingbird Cabinet's formal eccentricity. The book is divided into five chapters (with an introduction and coda) but its argument is chopped up into a series of bite-sized sections, some several pages long, some several sentences. This makes it on the whole a pleasurable read, but at times rather frustrating; it's like being offered an exquisitely presented plate of tapas when one is late for dinner. As a scholar of British Romanticism, Pascoe admits that the book's organization is partly...