The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Simon Goldhill (review)

In Knebworth House, an English country estate now open to the public but once owned by the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, there is an often overlooked glass case displaying a somewhat grisly sight: two ancient skulls. These objects were dug up in the Roman town of Pompeii, in which haphazard excavation had been taking place since the town’s first discovery in 1748; they were given to Bulwer-Lytton by the writer John Auldjo in 1856. There were many macabre and erotic objects from Pompeii in private circulation at this time. Some eighty years earlier, Sir William Hamilton had sold his collection of Pompeian votive phalluses to the nation, and in 1840 Louis Barré published his account of what he called “Le Musée Secret” in Naples, the cabinet of Pompeian erotica kept away from the public gaze, provoking as much fantastic speculation and lurid, imaginary illustration as sober understanding. But Bulwer-Lytton’s skulls were different. Beside them in the glass case is a label, carefully identifying them as the remains of Arbaces and Calenus, two characters in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Here is an example of fact meeting fiction, of genuine archaeological remains from Pompeii being used to corroborate a historical novel. While writers like Sir Walter Scott might have filled their houses with relics that relied on a degree of imagination and a willing suspension of disbelief—the cloth fragment from the dress worn by Mary Queen of Scots at her execution, for example—Bulwer-Lytton’s skulls were unabashed in their mingling of reality and invention.

Thus Simon Goldhill’s richly detailed new book, The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain, begins, investigating the way objects in the nineteenth century could reveal the ideological and political concerns of the period and conversely how the Victorians grounded their ideas about history, authenticity, race, and religion in the physical, material world. Originally a classicist and author of groundbreaking books on Greek tragedy and more recently on classical reception, Goldhill is concerned now with how the Victorians viewed the past in general. He is particularly interested in the intersection of classical and religious debate in the period: a conjunction that he argues is largely forgotten by modern scholars in our more secular age. To this end, much of the book is devoted to investigating church architecture and aspects of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem. New technologies and branches of scientific knowledge—archaeology, photography, phrenology, geology, philology, and linguistics—were commandeered paradoxically to give Victorians a greater access to the past, rendering antiquity apparently immediate and present before their eyes. In the most interesting chapter of the book, Goldhill argues that restoration is a “central, organizing expression of nineteenth-century conceptualizations of how history and the material interact” (145). He describes the conflict between those who wanted to restore old buildings like churches, often removing more modern “interpolations” in the process to refashion a more ancient version, and those “preservationists” who believed that buildings should be left to crumble according to the natural process of time and not artificially conserved or rebuilt (154, 152–53). In this opposition are revealed two different conceptions of authenticity and history and thus a microcosm of the Victorian approach to the past, evident in textual scholarship, literature, and religious practice as well as in buildings.

The Buried Life of Things does not aim to be a definitive account of the conception of material culture in the nineteenth century. Instead, it is structured around a series of case histories—or case objects, if you like. Bulwer-Lytton’s skulls are followed by a Roman mosaic unearthed in Dorset, a stone altar in the Round Church in Cambridge, a robe designed for a Christian priest, and many photographs of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Indeed each “thing” examined is bigger...