Introduction: Materialising Romanticism

Can we define Romanticism? If you answered an immediate “Yes,” possibly followed by a mark of exasperation like those reserved for recalcitrant students who appear not to be putting their heart into the task—“Obviously,” “Of course”—was your response immediately qualified by a “but,” a “though,” or even a “No”? While not framed as such, it was, in many ways, the implicit question behind RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition), its parent project the AHRC-funded network DREAMing Romantic Europe (2018–20), and this special issue of Romanticism on the Net. From its inception, our project sought to set up a network of academics and curators. Networks are impalpable, based on goodwill, contacts both formal and informal, common experiences, and sometimes instinctive appreciation of one another. This network was to cross disciplinary and geographical borders, to bridge divides, and to try, from a series of different, sometimes conflicting answers to address an opening question: “What is Romanticism?” The initial desire of getting curators and academics, galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and universities across Europe to work together demanded an agreed framework beyond this conventional (if ambitious) research question. Setting up a common project was an obvious way to give shape to the collaboration. Rather than conceiving a traditional conference or set of essays, we hit upon the idea of building an imaginary museum. From its inception, this aim was paradoxical, foregrounding the profoundly Romantic tensions between the virtual and the material. Our imaginary museum would be created online, a virtual exhibition which could bring together objects held in different places, objects, in the widest possible sense of the term, which might indeed be places or even events; objects, too, which have disappeared, been lost, remodelled, or destroyed. By using the material turn as a means of approaching Romanticism, so often defined through sentiments rather than things, imaginative arcs rather than materialities, we would offer up a kaleidoscope of answers as to the “what” of Romanticism, one which allowed room for a wide variety of approaches and sensibilities. But they have this in common: where other scholarship has typically started from how literary Romanticism thought about and represented objects, RÊVE has concerned itself with exploring how objects have been used, and are still being used, to think about and represent Romanticism. The remit for project participants was simple: choose an object which speaks of Romanticism in the literary-historical sense, and with one photographic image and a one-thousand-word text, explain why it merits its place within this collection’s fluctuating contours. RÊVE—the French word for dream—is a dream of a museum, one which will never exist otherwise than in a virtual format. Cross the threshold and you can row out to a Scottish island, climb a Swiss mountain, look warily over the Lakagígar volcanic fissure, take a Portuguese train with a Hungarian travelling box, bring English souvenirs back to Italy and Poland as well as Tahitian artefacts to Germany, or swim between continents with Leander and Byron. Here the exceptional and the mundane sit side by side, locks of a famous poet’s hair jostling ephemeral playbills or a deposed empress’s album. There are mass-produced items and carefully custom-crafted ones, natural wonders and works of art, witnesses to despair like mementoes of slavery, and to great hopes like the ring John Keats gave to Fanny Brawne. You will encounter famous names in the history of the Romantic era, from Austen to Wordsworth via Chateaubriand, Erdödy, Goethe, and many others, but also see anonymous figures brought out of the shadows, accompanying travellers down mineshafts, or crafting scientific instruments. Your senses will be attuned to …