In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting
  • Barbara J. Black (bio)
Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, edited by John Potvin and Alla Myzelev; pp. xiii + 234. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £55.00, $99.95.

Blue and white porcelain, Japanese knick-knackery, naughty harem paintings, scientific furniture, Henry Cole, Indian shawls, Tara brooches at the Crystal Palace, female taxidermists at home, Viceroy George Curzon—such are the treasures a reader of Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting will encounter. Edited by John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, this collection of essays on collecting, collectors, and their collectibles begins with a premise that has generated some of the best recent work in nineteenth-century studies: the life of material goods, especially when they are exchanged, consumed, exhibited, or displayed, is replete with stories to tell us. And those stories are always about us, for, as Jean Baudrillard asserts, “what you really collect [End Page 486] is always yourself” (qtd. in Potvin and Myzelev 1), a provocation that serves as an epigraph to the collection’s introduction.

True to its title, this assemblage of essays covers a wide historical span, beginning with Stacey Sloboda’s essay on eighteenth-century English women porcelain collectors and concluding with Joseph McBrinn’s examination of the mid-nineteenth-century Celtic jewelry revival that took on new and sublime shape in the early decades of the twentieth century. In between, the reader can work her way through a sequence of Victorian case studies that foregrounds how collecting helped to shape national identity as well as to construct various collective identities inflected by race, gender, and class concerns. We meet, among others, the dutiful housewife who collected as part of her household duties, the companions Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts who collected in order to establish an alternative domesticity of “queer intimacy” (193), and Curzon, who encouraged the British to collect (and thereby “preserve”) Indian craft in service to a crucial geopolitical agenda. Identity and the concomitant question of taste provide the through-lines for this volume. In an age of mass capitalism, taste becomes highly desirable and, at the same time, elusive. While nineteenth-century technologies of mechanical reproduction and cheap production make taste a cherished goal, they also raise the specter of false taste—perhaps nowhere more evident than in the anxieties that fueled Cole’s “Chamber of Horrors,” the focus of the volume’s fourth essay.

In their introduction, Potvin and Myzelev competently curate their collection, although I found their reliance on jargon distracting. A “positionality of betweenness” (15), which is offered up as a guiding concept, is not, for example, helpful or illuminating. While they would have been more effective guides had their prose been clearer, Potvin and Myzelev do—like bricoleurs—build the narrative that makes sense of the seeming miscellany of essays that follows. They identify their volume’s primary interest to be the collecting of craft, a focus that foregrounds the tense relationship between handiwork and high art. Other key binaries that are raised and complicated include collecting/consumption (often associated with women) versus connoisseurship (typically construed as a man’s activity), the bourgeois versus the patrician, and the functionality of usable objects versus the pure aesthetics of ornamentality. The pursuit of the authentic—often construed as the “exotic” or the “other” by the collectors assembled here—is the master passion in this book about pleasures. Excess and taste become particularly freighted terms when collectors’ enthusiasms slip into obsessiveness, and various “manias” ranging from Japan mania to bricabracomania invariably erupt on the pages of this volume. More sobering and earnest are the many moral arguments culled from the past in defense of collecting. Particularly for Victorians, collecting was an enterprise intimately connected to the desire for order and beauty in the home, material proof of the prosperity and mobility enjoyed by those who dwelled inside. Victorian gurus of domestic collecting like W. J. Loftie and Mary Eliza Haweis make appearances often and confidently here. One of the useful features of this volume is that it provides a guidebook of sorts to the past’s storehouse of guidebooks and...

pdf

Share