A “strange and mixed assemblage”: Sir John Soane, Archivist of the Self

In 1827, john britton was commissioned to write what would be the first book-length description of the house-museum of the distinguished architect and avid collector, Sir John Soane. Faced with the difficult task of capturing the spirit of the place, while attending closely to its various and eclectic contents, Britton—in his appropriately titled Union of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting; Exemplified by a Series of Illustrations, with Descriptive Accounts of the House and Galleries of John Soane—begins by reflecting that just as objects reveal the “predilections and partialities” of their owners, and are thus, one might justly extrapolate, so many expressions of the self, the house of the architect (like “the gallery of the Painter, and the library of the Author”) will inevitably display “some prominent characteristic trait of its respective owner.”¹ Pursuing this line of thought, Britton observes that domestic possessions, habits, and structures are more revealing than the company we keep (as the old adage holds), or what the practices of physiognomy or phrenology could perchance reveal, as a way of divining character.

While writers cannot literally inhabit their books, nor artists their paintings, architects can indeed live entirely within their own creations—and the fact that Soane’s house contained, among other things, the material remnants of many other buildings allows us to appreciate the extent to which it may be understood as self-reflective construction. Fragmentary exteriors are displayed on the inside—the building inverted, and the self opened out—such that the union of the arts championed by Britton’s title (and by Soane himself) might also apply to a suggestive merger between the architect’s body and its fabricated surroundings, exterior and interior alike. While Soane’s collections rival, in Britton’s estimation, “the finest cabinets and museums in Europe,” what the house itself achieves is “unique—a singular proof of what architecture is capable of producing by its own native resources” (2). Less accomplished architects, mere “pretenders, ” working with the various and hybrid styles of the moment but without feeling, “give us the mere caput mortuum, after suffering all the finer particles—the spirit, to evaporate; they complacently exhibit a mangled corse, instead of the living body endued with life and grace” (8). The house, here, is the architect’s body double, and in Soane’s case, this will prove especially apt.²

Soane’s house-museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is one of the only London museums still in existence that dates back in its present form to the Romantic period. During his lifetime, the house contained an ever-increasing quantity of architectural fragments, models, and casts, as well as books, paintings, and an array of diverse curiosities, and the border between residence, museum, and even the documentary archive supporting all of Soane’s activities was far from fixed. After his death in 1837, at which point the house officially became a museum, some of the movement between these categories inevitably ceased. The Soane Museum, over the course of its own lifetime, is thus poised intriguingly upon a number of thresholds. The specifically archival elements—from personal correspondence to professional records—coexist with the house and the museum, both of which evoke elements of the mausoleum and the monument. This convergence offers us an opportunity to reflect on the work of the archive in situations where it seeps into other related models of gathering and holding, such as the collection and the museum. For Soane’s archive is an archive in the traditional sense—a repository of papers or documents of historical significance, and/or the institution in which they are housed—and also an archive in the sense common in current cultural theory, where it is what Ann Laura Stoler calls “a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and untouched entail.”³

Understood in the former case as relatively passive and inert, the archive has come in recent theory to possess its own social life, or at least to be recognized as animated by...