Romanticism and the Museum by Emma Peacocke (review)

Emma Peacocke’s Romanticism and the Museum participates in an ongoing attempt to situate the rhetoric of romanticism within the exhibitory culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At least since Richard Altick’s encyclopedic treatment of The Shows of London (1978), celebrants of romantic culture have been as fascinated as the writers of the time with the collections, monuments, dioramas, and museums that seemed (and seem) to be just about everywhere. Beyond the inherent curiosity of such sites as Don Saltero’s Coffeehouse, William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, John Soane’s House and Museum, and the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, or the fraught triumphalism and uncanny hauntings of the British Museum and the National Gallery, we may perceive a wider “museum effect” (to cite, with Peacocke, Svetlana Alpers’s conceit) that converts so many landscapes, gardens, country homes, and abbeys, to say nothing of paintings, sculptures, and natural specimens, into objects redolent with both sensuous appeal and elusive meaning. Thus the experience of the aesthetic—theorized beyond recognition at precisely this period—becomes less the province of inspired poets and metaphysicians than the common purchase of an ever-diversifying national public.

The question for critical scholars remains how to relate this panoply of visual seduction and spiritual enlightenment to some of the more inventive and compelling literature of the era. Peacocke does not offer any single unified theory to conjoin the two subjects of her book’s title. Rather, she establishes their historical contemporaneity and proceeds to speculate on other means by which they might speak to one another. The content of this conversation turns out to depend greatly on the works in question, in terms of both their experiments with conventions of genre and the media culture through which they were produced and received. In most cases, what interests Peacocke is how representations of still scenes—depictions of paintings, statues, and galleries in poems, novels, and essays—embody a crisis of history, be it the traumas of the French Revolution, the haunting memories of Culloden, or the pull of the antique on a modern, commercial society. In four richly detailed chapters, she reads suggestive vignettes from William Wordsworth’s Prelude (1798), Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817), and periodical poetry and essays surrounding the Elgin Marbles controversy. It is the heterogeneity of these texts, and of the experiences they convey, that most interests Peacocke, for, taken together, they reveal the manifold dimensions of the “museum experience” writ large, one that greatly exceeds any programmatic ambition for institutions of national culture.

Affinities between the rhetorical manoeuvres of literary texts and the exhibition of artifacts, artworks, and specimens in the romantic period have been established by several decades of scholarship from Philip Fisher and James A.W. Heffernan to Grant F. Scott and Jonah Siegel, to name only a few. But Peacocke’s book demonstrates that there is always more to say. She may be overstating the case when she claims that “explicit engagement with a museum is at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic corpus” (17), but the number of visual encounters in The Prelude and the rhetorical means by which the poet connects them to personal cultivation and national memory certainly situate this autobiographical epic within a cultural moment of aesthetic self-fashioning. Likewise, while I question whether “ideas of the public gallery are essential to Waverley’s historiography” (58, emphasis added), Scott’s use of portraiture as a measure of historical and perceptual changes on either side of Culloden participates in a programmatic recasting of regional characters within a narrative of national reconciliation. Edgeworth’s anxious meditations on ethnicity and national character in private galleries and public auctions in Harrington may not contrast as sharply with Scott’s equally anxious observations on romance and nation as Peacocke would have it, but her reading of this important novel extends earlier considerations of Edgeworth’s treatment of aesthetics and heritage in important directions. [End...