Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (review)

In the introduction of his intelligent and engaging new book, John Plotz quotes a passage from Margaret Oliphant's 1890 novel, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago:

Marg'ret came back after a few minutes with a work-box in her hand. All kinds of things had come out of that box in the experience of the children at Drumcarro, things good and evil, little packets of powders for childish maladies, sweeties to be taken after the nauseous mouthful, needles and thimbles and scissors when these needful implements had all been lost, as happened periodically, even a ribbon or a pair of gloves in times of direst need. . . . She took from the bottom a little parcel in an old letter, folded closely and written closely to the very edge of the seal.

(14)

As in the miscellaneous work-box, "all kinds of things" are tangled together in Plotz's book, which overflows with useful material. The title, Portable Property, and indeed the striking cover photographs of a rocking horse, a cricket ball, a silver teapot, and a battered leather-bound book, all produce an expectation that the book will be about things, and things in motion. It is—and it isn't.

The Victorians "loved their things," says Plotz. "These are a few of their favorite things: Shakespeare's complete plays; an Indian pearl necklace sold to buy a copy of Samuel Johnson's Works; some unlabelled beetles bound for the British Museum; a monogrammed silver teapot; an Indian diamond with a "moony glow"; a Kashmiri shawl; a grandfather's chest of documents in various languages; a ruby ring, its provenance carved upon it in Farsi; an embroidered handkerchief in a silver box" (1). The list is powerfully suggestive, and Plotz is of course right that "the portaging of sentiment in beloved objects is a predictable, even a necessary, development in a world of increasingly successful commodity flow" (17). Others, such as Peter Fritzsche in his impressive Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004), have made similar arguments about the emotional charge that particular objects in this period seemed to gather as they moved, like a kind of affective friction.

"I am arguing that we ought to investigate ways in which cultural value is imagined circulating, in objects, practices, even in persons," announces Plotz (9). But he does not pursue this line very far, only returning to it in the conclusion to excuse his failure to push this enquiry further, defeated by "how entirely . . . notions of travelling culture changed over the mere seventy years covered by this study" (171). If we return to his list, we see the medley of favourite things is made up entirely of fictional objects imagined in the writing of Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Jane Ellen Panton, and Emily Eden—pointing to a central confusion in an argument that never adequately differentiates between things in fiction and things in the world.

Indeed, it is not long before the book swerves away from the object world altogether and announces its intention, instead, to focus upon novels: "the novel . . . is the logical breeding ground for reflections on cultural portability in large part because its own form—the self-sufficient but mimetic narrative, bound in covers but free to roam—makes it an ideal inhabitant of this world of portable cultural property" (72). What transpires is a traditional literary-critical series of chapters on largely canonical Victorian novels. Within these individual readings, there is much that is striking and perceptive, and Plotz is impressively well read in recent criticism. For example, the discussion of Eliot's use in Daniel Deronda (1876) of "the idea that successfully portabilized national culture can be pocketed, as it were" is a helpful intervention in the critical debate about racial inheritance around that novel (75), and Plotz's reading of Thomas Hardy as refusing regionalism in his writing—although odd in that...