The Brontë Cabinet
Page 33
Hallam, Elizabeth, and Jenny Hockey. Death, Memory, and Material Culture. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001.
Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Harvey, Anthony, and Richard Mortimer. The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1994.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Herrmann, Frank. The English as Collectors: A Documentary Chrestomathy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.
Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Jupp, Peter, and C. Gittings. Death in England: An Illustrated History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Kucich, John. Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500–c. 1800. London: Reaktion, 1991.
Logan, Peter. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Lutz, Deborah. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Maynard, John. Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God; Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1981.
Ousby, Ian. The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel, and the Rise of Tourism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Pascoe, Judith. The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Pearce, Susan. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995.
Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Polhemus, Robert. Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Richter, David. The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Schaaf, Larry J. Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins. New York: Aperture, 1985.
—. Sun Pictures: British Paper Negatives 1839–1864. Catalog 10. New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr., ca. 2001.
Schor, Esther. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Siegel, Elizabeth, Patrizia Di Bello, Marta Weiss, et al. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Taylor, Lou. Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983.
Thormählen, Marianne. The Brontës and Education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
—. The Brontës and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Zigarovich, Jolene. Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULDN’T have been written without Amy Cherry, my editor at W. W. Norton, who backed it in many ways with her alert intelligence, her ideas, and her belief in it from start to finish. A conversation with Amy, her assistant Laura Romain, and Renee Zuckerbrot, my agent, about found objects, archives, collecting, and a dog called Pilot (named for Rochester’s Newfoundland in Jane Eyre) helped shape the project from its conception.
Many friends read parts of this book. Polly Schulman tirelessly and enthusiastically commented on drafts of chapters as I wrote them, providing astute guidance as an editor and thinker. Kristofer Widholm enriched these pages with his sensitive, deft feedback and his skills as a writer, reader, and confidant. I am grateful to Talia Schaffer for her constant and long-standing support of my work, which has involved not only reading pretty much all of it (bless her!) and providing brilliant advice from her knowledge of all things Victorian, but also penning letters of praise, too numerous to count. I am lucky to be a member of a smart, hardworking writing group of Victorianists, many of whom read parts of this book: my gratitude to Carolyn Berman, Caroline Reitz, Tanya Agathocleous, Tim Alborn, and, as always, Talia. Dennis Denisoff I thank for his guidance on my dog chapter, for sharing his knowledge of dog nature, and for many (but not enough) fine dinner discussions about donkeys and meeting the eyes of animals. Tim Moreton of the National Portrait Gallery, London, provided thoughtful feedback on my walking chapter, showed me many death masks, and gave of his wide-ranging knowledge of portraiture, literary history, and museum artifacts over many delightful meals. Benjamin Friedman fixes and polishes my prose expertly and provides loyal friendship. Maggie Nelson contributes encouragement at all turns.
This book stands as a testament to the kindness I have received from curators, librarians, and staff at libraries, archives, and museums in America, Great Britain, and Western Europe, many of whom went out of their way to be helpful. Sarah Laycock and Ann Dinsdale at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire, were endlessly patient in showing me hundreds (literally) of objects, books, manuscripts, and little slips of paper. They let me sit in their quiet library on numerous trips, handling, studying, sniffing, turning about, and brooding over these many things to my heart’s content. Heather Millard at the Manor House Museum and Art Gallery, Castle Yard, Ilkley, shared her enthusiasm about the manuscripts we looked at together, and she went far beyond the requirements of her job to help me investigate the weather in Haworth during the Brontës’ lifetimes. Her willingness to open the Bradford archives to me, to send me pictures of Charlotte Brontë’s purse and other Brontë artifacts, and to lend me her time and energy was without compare. The charming Elizabeth Denlinger and her staff at the Pforzheimer Collection brought out all sorts of relics for me, and she assisted me with her knowledge of artifacts around New York and the United Kingdom. John Vincler and Maria Isabel Molestina at the Morgan Library gave of their time, setting out envelopes, letters, manuscripts, and association copies, as did Isaac Gewirtz, Joshua McKeon, and Lyndsi Barnes at the Berg Collection, who put up with many, many visits and retrieved piles of manuscripts and relics for me. Susan Halpert and Leslie Morris and other staff welcomed me to the Houghton Library at Harvard University. I am grateful to Kathryn Jones at the Royal Collection and Alexandra Barbour at Windsor Castle, who dug around Frogmore to unearth for me some of Queen Victoria’s more obscure jewels and objects. Thanks to Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library for his help with Shelley relics and books bound in human skin, and for giving me a kind welcome to Oxford and its research collections. Suzanne Canally, librarian at the Senate House Library at the University of London, told me about many death-inflected things in London. Thanks also to Lisa Darms and Charlotte Priddle at the Fales Collection, New York University.
Many
thanks to the staff and curators at the following collections for hosting me and generously fulfilling requests. In the United Kingdom: the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Wellcome Collection, the National Maritime Museum, the Keats House, the Hunterian Museum, the Foundling Museum, the Freud Museum, the Charles Dickens Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Museum of London, the Florence Nightingale Museum, the Apsley House, the Highgate Cemetery, and the Pitt Rivers Museum. In the United States: the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room, the General Research Division, the Art and Architecture Collection, and the Photography Collection; the Butler Library, Columbia University; the Bobst Library, New York University; the Thomas J. Watson Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia. Other places: the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna; the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin; and the Treasury in St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice.
I owe a special debt to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, of Magdalen College, for his kindness in welcoming me in numerous ways to Oxford and arranging for me to speak at Magdalen about Victorian relics. Thanks for the glamorous meals and the words of encouragement and support. Many in the English faculty at Oxford were generous with their time and ideas, especially Stefano Evangelista and Sally Shuttleworth. Thanks to the attendees of the Victorian Research Seminar for letting me try out some of these thoughts on Brontë artifacts on them, and for their feedback and criticism.
The company, conversation, and work of still others—colleagues, friends, writers, curators—supplied thought, fuel, inspiration, and vision. I am grateful to Elaine Freedgood, whose friendship has meant so much to me; Will Murphy, for his help with making the leap from academic publishing to trade; Sharon Marcus; Marcia Pointon; Claire Harman, for our talks about all things Brontë; Wayne Koestenbaum, for teaching me to use appealing verbs; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Avital Ronell; David McAllister, for chats about death and for his invitation to speak about death masks at Birkbeck; Deborah Rubin, for teaching me all sorts of things; Steve Kirschner and Janice Gitterman, for discussing chapter titles; Melissa Dunn; Domenick Ammirati; Jean Mills; Rachel Szekely; Will Fisher; Tom Fahy; Cara Murray; James Bednarz; John Lutz; Duc Dau; Joanne Mariner, for lending me her apartment in London and her house in the woods, and for her nighttime birdsong; John Kucich; Richard Kaye; Pam Thurschwell; Anne Humpherys; Gerhard Joseph; Jeff Dolven; Sina Najafi at Cabinet, who also felt heartbroken about the dolphin who died in the Gowanus; Dr. Gabriel Heaton, at Sotheby’s, London, for sending me pages of auction catalogs; and Roland Albrecht and Marianne Karbe, of the Museum der Unerhörten Dinge.
Many people pondered Emily Brontë’s “puzzle” wafer seals with me. Members of the National Puzzlers’ League, especially Ronnie Kon and Treesong, decoded a number of them for me. Deb Amlen cracked the codes of some too. Bill Lunsford of the American Cryptogram Association was also a big help, as was Betsy Rohaly Smoot and Rene Stein at the Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency.
There has been so much extraordinary work done on the Brontës, I could write a whole book of thanks, and I have tried to include as much as possible in my endnotes and the list of further reading. Juliet Barker’s work has been especially foundational for me and for anyone working on the Brontës. Margaret Smith’s edition of Charlotte Brontë’s letters has been seminal and is an astounding piece of scholarship. I have been inspired by the writing of Steven Vine, Stevie Davies, and Elisabeth Bronfen.
At Long Island University, I am grateful to my students for discussions about Victorian women and collaboration, especially ABC (Amanda Beth Campbell), Nikki Cosentino, and Nicole McGovern. At the library, I thank the interlibrary loan staff, especially Claudette Allegrezza, for all their help. A sabbatical gave me time to complete this project, and a grant from the LIU Post Faculty Research Committee provided funds for the illustrations.
Thanks to the staff and fellow patrons at various cafes and bars where I felt my way through these chapters, especially at Ashbox, Troost, Propeller, Turl Street Kitchen, Kings Arms of Haworth, and Black Bull.
I am grateful for the affection of my family: Pamela, Sandy, Doug, Veronica, and Leroy.
Finally, I am beholden to Tony Sebok for a whole host of generosities: for his ceaseless interest as I talked for hours about Victorian dog licensing, fern fever, and much else; for the main title of the book; for his comments and ideas at all stages; for always being a loving fan of my writing.
Illustrations
Figure 1: Branwell’s “Blackwood’s Magazine,” January 1829, with the cover made from recycled advertisements and bound with brown yarn.
Figure 2: Charlotte’s needlework box with some of its contents. Note the cowrie shell measuring tape and the black, round pillbox on the top right.
Figure 3: Photograph of path on the moors that Emily often walked, taken by the author.
Figure 4: Emily’s watercolor of Keeper without his collar.
Figure 5: Lock of Mrs. Maria Brontë’s hair from the framed collection of the Brontë family’s hair samples.
Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Page numbers beginning with 257 refer to endnotes.
Abbotsford, 90
Abergele, 71
abortion, 243–44
Ackroyd, Tabby, 2, 4, 9–10, 19, 37, 96, 105, 138, 210
Adonais (Shelley), 25
“Adventures of a Pen, The” (Hunt), 175
Agnes Grey (A. Brontë), 2, 19, 28, 30, 40, 47, 50, 54, 60–61, 119, 165
publication of, 179, 180
Albert, Prince, 102, 113, 136, 206–7, 225
“Albion and Marina” (C. Brontë), 23
albums, 220, 225–35, 288–91
autograph and friendship, 228–31, 233, 289, 290
fern, 225–27, 232, 233, 289
scrapbook, 234–35
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 50–51, 164
Alloway Kirk, 240
Alps, 75, 267
Anatomy Act of 1832, 26
“animal magnetism,” xxiii, 203
animals, 125
cruelty to, 96, 100, 101, 107
poaching of, 101
special powers of, 99–100
street trade in, 103
trials and convictions of, 98–99, 271–72
see also specific animals
Argyll Chapel, 48
Arnold, Matthew, 91
Ashburnham, 45
Ashley Library, 249
Ashmolean Museum, xxii
“At Castlewood” (E. Brontë), 159
Athénée Royal, 145
Austen, Cassandra, 130, 280
Austen, George, 13
Austen, Jane, 13, 130–31, 166, 280
works of, 79–80, 128, 204
Autun, 98–99
Aylott and Jones, 171, 176
Bacon, Francis, 24
bacteria, 209
Barker, Miss, 79
Bath, 22
Beatty, William, 242
Beaudry, Mary, 47
Belgium, 19, 119, 142, 182
Bewick, Thomas, 31, 117
Bibles, 15, 19, 70, 231
family records in, 22
inscriptions in, 17, 18
reading aloud from, 28
Bicknell, Karen, 155
Binns, Ann Brown, 247
“Bird, Let Loose in Eastern Skies, The” (Moore), 54
birds, 11, 99, 102, 111–12, 116, 117, 119, 232, 255, 291
“black arts,” 226–27
Black Bull tavern, 27, 67
Black Combe mountain, 76
Blackwood, William, 6
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 5–6, 26, 27, 67
“Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine,” 6–8, 23, 39, 158, 176, 259
“Silver Cup, The: A Tale” in, 6–7
“Young Men” plays in, 8, 105
>
Bloomsbury Group, 13
Bob (cat), 103
Bodichon, Barbara, 80
Bodleian Library, 25
books, 128
binding of, 13–14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 32, 176, 180
closeness of bodies and, 23–24, 26
commonplace, 228, 290
covers of, 16, 22–23, 24, 25
drawings and inscriptions in, xx, xxi–xxii, 15, 16–18, 19, 20, 30–31
French, 14
gifts of, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22–23
handling of, 15, 16, 18, 24, 28, 33
insertions in, xxii, 19–21, 24–25, 235
library, 14, 26, 69
as memory devices, 18, 20, 32, 33
miniature, 4–12
prayer, 13, 19
rarity and value of, 13–14, 15–16, 21
reading and reading aloud of, 28–32, 172
repurposing of, 19, 22, 28
scent of, xxii, 14–16, 24–25
selling of, 246
stains and scribbles in, 14–15, 16, 18
stealing of, 26
talismanic qualities of, 20–21
Boundy, Miss, 48, 49
Bradford, 69, 78, 132–33, 135
Branwell, Elizabeth, 3, 4, 28, 37, 40, 42–44, 49, 78, 96, 115
death and legacy of, 17, 119, 142, 159, 169, 189
Branwell family, 251
“Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine,” 6, 14, 158
Brawne, Fanny, 195
British Library, 25, 166, 179, 210, 262
British Museum, xxii, 145, 203, 249, 291
Brontë, Anne, 15–16, 20, 56–57, 77, 158, 186, 190, 201, 206, 254
Acton Bell as pseudonym of, 170–71, 176, 229
burial of, 91, 120, 193
childhood and adolescence of, 3, 6, 8, 10–12, 22–23, 36–40, 194
diary papers of Emily and, 37–39, 41, 57, 64, 74, 118, 158, 161–62, 245, 248, 263, 268, 271, 278
education of, 65–66
governess position of, 41, 50, 60, 128, 142, 165, 168, 173
illness and death of, 18, 32, 89, 120, 121, 150, 172, 173, 179, 184, 186, 193–94, 200