Abstract

This essay tracks the inscriptions and disseminations of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of A Favourite Cat drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” and of Horace Walpole’s china tub. An incongruous element of chinoiserie in the Gothic fabric of Strawberry Hill, the tub marks the intersections between the orders of the collection, the house, and the book. Building on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the orders of things and the unities of discourse, this essay follows the paper-trail of the object and the poem through their inscription and extra-illustration in books that prove unstable repositories in a dynamic order of collecting.

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