Number 80-81, Spring–Fall 2023 Materialising Romanticism Guest-edited by Catriona Seth and Nicola J. Watson

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Drawing on selected objects from RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition), this essay discusses possible ways of exploring Romantic-period bodies through their material relics, including textual inscriptions, and immaterial traces such as sensations or memories. Its focus is on artefacts that enable us to outline narratives about culture-specific notions of the physical, as well as the experiences and affects associated with it. To this end, the essay focuses particularly on exhibits related to the mourning and memorializing of a (dead) beloved body – male or female, real or imagined, and treated seriously or comically – and how they testify to an intersection of competing, though interlaced, forms of dispersal and collection, fragmentation and recomposition. Among the objects examined are Teresa Guiccioli’s travelling chest, a medallion with Byron’s hair, Tippoo’s Tiger, and Thomas Hood’s poem “Mary’s Ghost.” This contribution explores a portion of the vast and heterogeneous cultural corpus of conceptions and experiences of the Romantic-era body in order to trace narratives of mediation and incompleteness that may open up unsuspected new approaches to, and interpretations of, Romantic-period corporealities.

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The process of curating a writer or artist’s home and collections rewards the curator with a series of vignettes of their daily life and creative process. However, in this video, Archer-Thompson, the Curator of Abbotsford, explores the significance of a view itself, notably the last view that Sir Walter Scott surveyed from his deathbed through the dining-room window of his beloved home. For the many visitors who came in search of Scott after his death with their guidebooks and Waverley Novels in hand, this window would mark a place in the house peculiarly charged with emotion and Romantic resonance.

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Thomas Carlyle characterised pre-Revolutionary France as “The Paper Age,” where paper signifies a flimsy and fraudulent culture of inflated ideas and depreciated money. Yet paper was also the substantial vehicle of Romantic literary and intellectual endeavour and the circulation of ideas—a ubiquitous, multifarious medium and powerful agent of cultural change across Romantic Europe. Paper means books, magazines, manuscripts, letters, but also wallcoverings, wrappings, papier maché objets d’art, and waste. This essay explores the multivalencies of Romantic paper: at once fragile, vulnerable, and ephemeral (the single sheet) and resilient, flexible, and enduring (the bound book); both high culture (Wordsworth’s The Excursion) and high prestige (Coleridge’s unique Malta notebook) but also low culture (playbills) and low prestige (manufactured from rags). Shifting attention from the inky message to the paper medium, and drawing on technological, economic, ecological, regional, and labour contexts of paper manufacture, distribution, use, and reuse, this article aims to theorise and apprehend anew a tactile and affectively loaded Romantic material that can be invisible and elusive in its portability, transformability, and pervasiveness.

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At age fourteen, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) read a manuscript of a Wordsworth poem from Lyrical Ballads and his life was transformed. Eight years later he visited Wordsworth’s Grasmere home of Dove Cottage, becoming its tenant two years after that. In the years there which followed, De Quincey developed a strong addiction to opium and wrote of his experiences in Confessions of an English Opium Easter, a best-selling book published in 1822. This video discusses the background to this work, featuring the author’s opium scales and manuscript.

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This essay takes those exhibits in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition) that are connected to “air” as points of departure for a survey of the renewed interest in air in Romantic-period cultural texts from across Europe. Scholarly interest in Romantic air has burgeoned of late but has often tended to prioritise metaphorical senses of the term or cognate terms such as atmosphere. This essay, conversely, focuses on more literal engagements with what Percy Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound, calls the “all-sustaining air.” Beyond this primary focus on the literal, however, the essay is also attentive to overlap between actual and metaphorical air in the specific context of the (Romantic) museum, with its complex evocation of what we might call “the air of the past,” an evocation which many of the Romantic-period texts considered here anticipate.

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This essay draws on fifteen exhibits in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition) as well as on a sample of texts and paintings in order to show the significance of stones to European Romanticism, contributing among other things to the age’s sentimental and Gothic cultures, to its development of landscape aesthetics and tourism, and to its historicism and new understanding of revolution in natural history and in politics. Using John Ruskin as a narrative thread, the essay focuses on the period’s quest to ascribe agency to stones and stone-related artefacts through imaginative sympathy and affect. While stone long stood for solidity and permanence in Western culture, it also came to be seen during the Romantic period as a fragile, even vital thing.

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Newstead Abbey is a reliquary of many, many stories from Lord Byron’s time in residence and the centuries before and after. Each generation has left its mark on the house, but the centrepiece of the site’s history will always be Byron. Inspired by and fascinated with its already ancient history, the poet left an indelible mark on everything that has happened there since.

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The essay opens by reflecting on the elemental qualities of water and its manifold cultural meanings in Western art and literature as well as in other exhibits in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition). Keats’s fascination with water, famously engraved on his epitaph in Rome, is linked to his Scottish tour of 1818 and his undescribed visit to the Falls of Foyers. The Scottish Highland tour was an open-air museum, linking up a series of spectacular waterfalls. Symptomatic of a new fascination with waterfalls shown by eighteenth-century garden designers and landscape painters, these watery spectacles aroused sublime euphoria in Romantic writers and picturesque tourists. Landowners capitalised on the Romantic obsession with waterfalls in establishing viewing sites and tourist infrastructure. Despite their ornamental and non-utilitarian nature, cascades demonstrated the “power” of water, a major energy source in the early pre-carbon industrial age. The second part of the essay analyses the reactions of a selection of literary tourists, from Dr Johnson to Sarah Murray and Coleridge, to the celebrated Falls of Foyers, opened up to tourism by Roy’s military road through the Highlands, and later by Telford’s Caledonian Canal. An afterward explores the demise of Foyers as a tourist site and its transformation into an industrial landscape.

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This essay attempts to see the wood and the trees by considering a selection of entries in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition). Living trees in the landscape are here included alongside products fashioned from timber to draw attention to the often-neglected dimensions of wooden items. While the sources of wood are rooted in particular places, objects made from timber are able to move and accrue meaning through use and association. The essay moves from the Selborne Yew, made famous in the Romantic period by Gilbert White, to a tea caddy derived from another contemporary literary celebrity, Yardley Oak, before considering travel boxes owned by Teresa Guiccioli and Byron and the implications of furniture fashions for the survival of rare arboreal species. The essay is concerned with different kinds of value, as influenced by commercial markets, fashion, quality, literary and historic association, and environmental concerns. It thus considers a Stradivari violin and an Ayrshire fiddle, a Mauchline ware binding and a literary monument set among living trees.

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Curator Emma Yandle identifies the most Romantic object in the Chawton House collection as Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, a slim volume published in 1800, just months before the writer’s untimely death at forty-three years old. Robinson was an eighteenth-century actress, celebrity, and writer, who has long been mostly remembered for her relationship with the Prince of Wales (later George IV), who fell in love with her on stage as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. In recent decades, she has been reclaimed as one of the most important and overlooked writers of the period. Deeply inspired by the radical poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Robinson’s final poems are a marked departure: interweaving her command of metre, flair for narrative, and embrace of the Gothic into tales of ordinary women, refugees, and social outcasts. This short film introduces Robinson and the tragic story of her life; examines Chawton House’s copy of Lyrical Tales as a material object; and traces the repeated motif of the gravestone through Robinson’s poetry to her own final resting place—with its self-authored epitaph—in the graveyard of Old Windsor Church.

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Moving, and the things people brought with them on the move, can take us many ways into, across, and out of Romantic Europe. This essay begins by reflecting on objects which represent the mass forced movements at the centre of Romanticism: the waves of immigration and exile spurred by the French Revolution and the unwilling transit of millions of Africans to enslavement in the Caribbean. I then turn to a more individualised account of what a European on the move might have taken with them, an approach which allows us to reflect both on the importance of the oft-ignored things that travellers moved with and on continuities between the Romantic attitudes and the modern material culture of travel. The objects described prompt an exploration of such broad topics as aesthetics, economics, reading practices, and the growing professionalisation of authorship, while also allowing for reflection on the personal and often emotional attachments that travellers had with their belongings.

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Nominally addressed to the “museum,” this essay delineates its broad features in the Romantic period, a time of remarkable experimentation and growth, while exploring the adjacent possibilities of a digital “museum” such as RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition). Recovering the imaginative and eclectic model of the early modern curiosity cabinet, a form of gathering and containment for the notable and the contingent that actively engages the beholder in making connections, I approach the museum less as a fixed place or structure than as a scene of action (or related actions) that bears closely on Romanticism and its materialities, particularly in the realm of memory, mobility, interiority, temporality, and presence. The museum, in this way, is what it does, or what it enables us to do, as we organize, frame, and document (as well as overlook, misappropriate, and forget) the ever-rising tide of material things that marked the turn of the nineteenth century. From paintings to travelling cases, reliquaries to trees, folding screens to books, writers’ chairs to locks of hair, RÊVE’s exhibits perform or repeat the museum’s essential gestures by assembling and mediating objects for our considered inspection, while making space for things to form associations, to re-member, to move—and in turn, to move us.

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This article investigates the importance of loss in the Romantic period from two perspectives: as a philosophical concept that bears on Romantic linguistic theory and perceptions of history and in terms of particular objects that either bear traces of loss or point to or represent lost objects. Ruins are architectural signifiers of a Romantic feeling of the transience of time and nostalgic reminiscences of a bygone past. Bodies in particular open up a whole range of possible signification: dead poets’ hair functions as a relic-like fetish, manuscripts as tokens of a material testimony of the poet’s genius remind us of the connection between mind and text, and poets’ statues bear witness to the transformation of the living body into a lasting cultural monument. Loss often indicates not only material loss but also the loss of original meaning, when the semantic attribution of things changes through recontextualization or relocation. Finally, when thinking about what is deemed worthy of preservation for posterity (mostly objects connected with a famous person of the period), one also needs to reflect on what is not preserved. In the context of Romantic authorship, it is very often the material belongings of women writers that were lost. The article concludes with a case study of two German Romantic writers, Emilie von Berlepsch and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and discusses the lack of material representation of their lives and works in a museum context.

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Emphasizing the mutability and volatility of Romantic matter, the essays collected in this special issue evoke a museum in motion. This afterword, however, focuses on a secondary line of argument running through Materialising Romanticism—this issue’s account of how the Romantics often used things to move themselves. To bring that account to the fore and demonstrate its continued relevance to our twenty-first-century pandemic moment, as to twenty-first-century distance learning, I explore the Romantic-era invention of concepts of armchair travel and armchair travelers—figures who use material objects to jump-start experiences of imaginative transport and of traveling in place. As an initial illustration of such uses, I engage with an early-nineteenth-century parlor amusement called the myriorama, which promised that an almost infinite number of landscapes could be created through the manipulation of only twelve or sixteen cards. I turn next to two Romantic-period literary examples—Xavier de Maistre’s memoir of house arrest and how-to book for mental travel, Voyage autour de ma Chambre, and the episode in Mansfield Park that dramatizes the lessons in both dwelling and escape that Austen’s heroine Fanny Price reads off the collectibles she has gathered up in the manor house’s old schoolroom.

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This suite of poems, mostly inspired by objects in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition), engages with Romantic themes, voices, and forms to make playful literary reflections on materiality. They speak about how objects speak to us perfectly and imperfectly, how new and old words translate and transpose, and how poetry can renew lingering romantic echoes.