Operación mina.

‘Too Close’: The Collector’s Touch

Introduction

Tucked away in a box in the Cuming Museum archive on the Walworth Road, Southwark, London, is a small bundle of five or six gradually rotting petals. Nestled amongst cotton fibre packing, inside a small wooden box, they are slowly browning and crisping, becoming more delicate with each passing year. As a botanical specimen, they are entirely unremarkable, being

ordinary petals of balsam, a plant commonly found in Britain and regarded as an insidious and persistent weed. Aesthetically, they are not particularly pleasing, and they provide no richer subject for the artist’s pen than any other decomposing vegetation might do. They have been a part of the Cuming collection since 1875 when Henry Cuming picked them up from the ground, possibly stowing them temporarily in his pocketbook for transportation, as he was wont to do with botanical finds, and took them home to attend to their careful preservation and labelling. A note in his hand, tucked inside the box, informs us of their significance:

Balsam. One of the Flowers thrown before the Princess of Wales & on which She stepped after witnessing a Supper at Christ’s Hospital. March 11 1875. (Picked up by H.S.C.)1

1 _{Object label, C10653. London, Cuming Museum.}

Figure 6. Photograph of balsam petals collected by Henry Cuming. Cuming Museum object inventory number C10653.

The label remains carefully stored with the box, for without the brief story that it tells, the petals have no discernible value. If they were to be separated from the label, no degree of observation or analysis of their material form could suggest the reason for their presence in the collection. They would become, as the documentation category of Southwark Collections digital museum management system currently understands and entitles them, mere ‘vegetal remains’.

This designation is completely at odds with how Henry Cuming understood the objects’ meaning. For him, the petals provided a tangible material link to the Princess Alexandra: they are the flowers, his label notes, ‘on which She stepped’. He collected many other items related to celebrated religious, royal or political figures: a phial containing a fragment of the wedding cake of the Prince and Princess of Wales’, from 1863; a scrap of velvet used to cover the coffin of the unfortunate Queen Caroline, dated 1821; shoes reputed to have been worn by Queen Anne; a lock of hair taken from the head of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1761 by a Mrs. Hetherington, passed on to Henry by the granddaughter of that woman in 1873; a tooth from the body of King Alphonso VI of Portugal, taken from his grave in 1833; a cut glass chandelier drop said to have been struck from Bonaparte’s coffin, and a portion of an iron cramp from Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, to name just a few.2 _Where

these items feature in the Cumings’ unfinished manuscript catalogue, they are listed as ‘memorials of events’.3 _{Henry understood the significance of these objects, not in terms of}

their material properties, but in terms of their associations, their ability to act as markers for particular events or people. The clinical contemporary heading, ‘vegetal remains’ is a

2 _{The funerary items associated with Bonaparte and Chaucer are both mentioned in the manuscript}

catalogue compiled by Henry but their whereabouts is currently unknown. The remaining items remain extant in the collection but are not listed in the manuscript catalogue, although most have labels written in Henry’s hand which offer an explanation of their provenance. They have

subsequently been allocated catalogue numbers by Southwark Council museum staff, which are as follows: C10613 (wedding cake); C10597 (velvet); C02264 and C02265 (shoes); C10563 (tooth); C04882 (hair). These can be used to locate the items on the Southwark Collections online database, www.southwarkcollections.org.uk.

striking marker of the multiple valencies that objects can have, and how those meanings can be variously silenced or amplified in museum settings.

The multiplicity of meanings that objects might contain and transmit troubled Victorian museum administrators and curators, who used display and labelling in order to corral them into a particular narrative. Peter Schwenger has described the chasm which always exists between subjects and objects thus; ‘[p]ossession is the preoccupation and pride of the subject, but not of the object, which is totally indifferent to the subject's notions of ownership. That indifference allows the object continually to slip out of any order that claims to explain it – economic, symbolic, psychoanalytic.’4 _{It is this slipperiness which}

means that the viewer or reader of any given cultural text can destabilise the meaning that was meant to reside in the semiotic sequence of objects. Meaning is located, therefore, outside the object, somewhere between the object itself and the observer.5 _{The meaning of}

museum artefacts, then, despite the efforts of the nineteenth century’s museum pioneers, was never entirely under administrators’ control, as Sam Alberti suggests; ’[h]owever didactic and interpreted an exhibition, responses were a combination of that which was elicited by the display and that which came from within the visitor —things remembered and felt.’6 _{Alberti’s work on what he calls ‘museum affect’ traces how visitors to museums}

brought their own histories and emotions to bear on museum displays and shows how objects continued to be affective even in tightly-controlled and didactic museum settings. This semantic instability of objects enables collectors to subvert the project of meaning- making at work in the museum, using their own collections to explore new approaches to the thing and new ways of understanding its relation to the world and to other objects.

4 _{Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of}

Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 79.

5 _{For a demonstration of this see Susan M. Pearce, ‘Objects as Meaning: Or Narrating the Past’}

in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. by Susan M. Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 19-29. 6 _{Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, 'Objects and the Museum', Isis, 96:4 (2005), 559-71 (p. 569).}

The first chapter of this section explores how nineteenth-century museum culture carried out the silencing of such approaches through the suppression of one particular mode of sensory encounter with material objects – the sense of touch. Frequently for the

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century museum visitors whom Alberti discusses, it is illicit touch that initiates their affective encounters with museum objects. Chapter One

establishes how ocularcentrism burgeoned in Victorian museums, part of a wider culture of vision which has been understood as a defining feature of modernity. It demonstrates how the mode of perception intrinsic to museum settings was closely bound to their pedagogical purpose, and a desire on the side of administrators and legislators to ensure that the museum was imparting the ‘right’ messages. ‘Useful’ collecting was determined by the conditions under which the collection might be said to provide useful instruction, and museums strove to deliver this instruction through visual display. This required, it is argued, a disciplining of the body, and particularly of touch, its most diffuse sensory mode. The privileging of the disembodied eye in fictionalised idealised museum encounters is shown to be an important condition under which the accusation ‘too close!’ came to be levelled at collectors in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Chapter One concludes by suggesting that touch’s banishment from museum settings was not an accident but a conscious strategy with the purpose of suppressing the ability of touch to create affective relationships, imaginative encounters, and intimate connections with historically or temporally distant people.

The reconfiguration of Henry’s balsam petals in collection documentation, from a material form of memory to a botanical specimen, is reflective both of the collection’s move from a private into a public arena, in which its objects were supposed to act as lessons, and a wider historical change in how knowledge was produced and organised: the move from curiosity to taxonomical systems of categorisation. But the semantic reassignation of the balsam petals is also indicative of a further way in which touch was banished from museum settings, because, as relics, they derived their power from physical contact with

Princess Alexandra. Relics are items which gain their significance through metonymy. They are objects, perhaps fragments of objects, which through close physical proximity are linked with a celebrated event or person. They both implicate the tactile, through their intimate association with the body, and invite it, for, as chapter two explores, it is only by touching that their unique materiality can be confirmed. Touch is the sensory mode best suited to their comprehension, and by this same virtue they became inimical to late nineteenth-century positivist historiography; the history of the banishment of touch from the museum is also, necessarily, the history of the banishment of the relic. The second chapter of this section, therefore, goes on to further explore how touch’s power as a tool for historical inquiry was understood in the nineteenth century through a study of relic culture. It picks up the thread of this introduction by discussing further relics of the Cuming collection and the wider context of imaginative antiquarian engagement with the relics of the past. It also situates collecting’s emergence as a popular practice as part of a spectrum of Victorian cultural activities which all derived their popularity and significance from a shared understanding of the operations of material memory. I explore how things carrying the traces of historical hands remained a significant source of interest for collectors, despite their marginalisation in museum contexts. I consider how collectors in the nineteenth century valued touch as a discriminatory tool and as a means of forging imaginative connections with the pasts and peoples connected with their objects, and how relics were particularly suggestive and potent gateways for these relationships.

In an 1875 article which roundly condemns collectors for a variety of sins, including mercenariness, competitiveness, and finding pleasure ‘in the mania for collecting, not in the collection itself’, an anonymous author for The Graphic mocks the suspicious bodily practices of a collector of ceramics:

There is really a very comic side to this china mania, and the spectacle of a coarse yellow mug, a little awry in shape, and daubed rather than painted, nursed in

velvet, brought out carefully, as nurse would bring in the little duke of two months’ old, taken in the hand tenderly, and felt with the peculiar squeeze or fond rub with which the amateur enjoys his treasure, quite suggests the hideous pug, bestowed on a silk cushion, and pampered by his mistress.7

The collector’s affection for his objects is figured here as an absurd lunacy made manifest by his hand. The problem is not merely that his affection is misplaced, but that his caress bespeaks an intimacy that ought to be reserved only for the living: a human infant, or, at worst, a pet dog. The collector’s touch is an inappropriate perversity, bestowing upon a thing, qualities which ought to be preserved for the animate. In this ‘very comic’ scene, the ‘morose and worn face’ of a collector betrays the toll that a shared conjugal passion for ceramics has wrought: ‘this unfortunate mutual taste has introduced jealousy, envy, spite; they spar over a cup and saucer more vindictively than over a baby.’8 _{The collectors,}

husband and wife, are too close to their things, so that affections that ought to be reserved for their human progeny are transferred onto their figurines: ‘[t]hey are now more

interested in a pair of “Chelsea Derby” figures than in the wellbeing of little Tom and Mary.’9 _{As detailed in the introduction to this thesis, depictions of collectors in Victorian}

popular literature frequently focus on their misplaced affections for things, as if their proper sensibilities regarding the difference between objects and subjects were

unbalanced. In the late nineteenth century, these criticisms become more commonplace, and the collector’s aberrance, while continuing to be located around their preference for things over people, is increasingly inscribed corporeally – ‘too close’ is a warning for the body as much as for the emotions, as collectors’ continued physical nearness to their objects is frequently portrayed as a factor in their monomania or misanthropy. Indeed, the nineteenth century creates many of the clichés about the collector’s body and its

7 _{[Anon.] ’The China Mania’, The Graphic, 17 April 1875, p. 379.} 8 _Ibid.

abnormalities which haunt our imaginings of certain kinds of collectors even today: the virginal train-spotter, the pale and anaemic stamp collector, the unkempt and filthy hoarder. An 1867 article on book collectors which appeared in Leisure Hour describes a typical book collector, a bachelor, ‘shabby’, ‘seedy’ and ‘slipshod’, ‘his lean forefinger, like the beak of a foraging crow in the furrow’, darting out to select a ‘possible booty.’10

Another writer claims that the ‘antiquary who collects for the sake of the collection’ is ‘wild and uncultured, dirty and ragged from head to foot, with black nails, unshaven beard, uncombed hair, battered hat, and capacious pockets always full.’11 _{These figures are}

always solitary, for collectors’ affections for objects have frequently been understood, both then and now, to be at the expense of their relations with humans, despite evidence that collecting is and has historically been a social activity.12 _{Richard Marsh writes his}

collectors Tress and Pugh as objects of ridicule, wealthy men with misdirected energies who collect for money, prestige, and for collecting itself, but primarily to outdo one another - and they, too, exhibit the bodily perversity expected of their type. In ‘The Adventure of the Cabinet’, Tress, on being reunited with a cabinet he had wanted to purchase but had thought lost, exclaims ‘my beauty! My treasure!’ whilst ‘stretching out his arms to it’ and speaking ‘in a tone of passionate emotion’, before touching it ‘with the finger-tips of his right hand, as a lover might touch the soft cheek of his mistress’.13 _His

competitor Pugh, on being parted from this piece of furnishing, pleads that he ‘might spend a few hours with it in silent communion, so that in solitude I might bid it a long farewell.’14 _{Tress and Pugh are exemplars of a particular kind of gentleman collector type}

common at the fin-de-siécle; consumed by their own powers of consumption, they care only for things, and the reflected glory of the things that they might come to possess. Their

10 _{[Anon.] ‘Book Collectors’, The Leisure Hour, 16 February 1867, pp. 108-09 (p. 108).}

11 _{[Anon.] ‘Curiosity-Hunters’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 19 October 1839, pp. 310-11 (p. 310).}

12 _{See Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition} (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 230-32.

13 _{Richard Marsh, Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (Kansas City: Valancourt}

Books, 2007 [originally published London: John Long, 1898]), p. 55. 14 _{Marsh, p. 64.}

heightened sensibility to aesthetic experience, enacted through the body, situates them as relatives of the decadent figures of the Aesthetic movement. Upper-class and foppish, Tress and Pugh directly associate themselves with these aesthetes through their absorption in aesthetic concerns and sensitivity to the decorative arts; Pugh calls the cabinet ‘the thing of beauty which I loved almost as I loved my life’.15 _{Parodies of such}

figures represented their bodies as weak and frail, a corporeal rendering of their sensitive intellects, and an enaction of their feminising association with modes of consumption. Even prior to Aestheticism’s influence, this association between the collector as consumer and a weakened masculinity was evident in some portrayals; Collins’s Frederick Fairlie is a sickly, enfeebled aristocrat, whose ‘fixation with collected objects…supplants fundamental human contact.’16 _{Like Tress and Pugh, Fairlie is a bachelor, and the stymied development}

of sexuality has come to be understood as a mark of the collecting habit, such that Jean Baudrillard declares that ‘[i]nvariably it runs counter to active genital sexuality’.17 _This

enduring image of the collector’s impotence caused by the misdirection of affection and bodily desire toward objects rather than subjects is a Victorian legacy, and depictions of deviant collectors who got ‘too close’ to their things undoubtedly draw on the cultures of consumption and aestheticism for their power.

There is scope, however, to reorient our conversations about the Victorian collector’s deviant body to critically evaluate these enduring stereotypes. Victoria Mills, in her essay exploring the portrayal of sensory experience in depictions of bibliomania, has noted the importance of tactility to nineteenth-century bibliophiles seeking, buying and caressing their books. Her readings of bibliophilic writings identify not only collectors’ sexually inflected caressing, but also the way that such touch ‘works in tandem with other forms of

15 _{Marsh, p. 63.}

16 _{Kirkby-Jane Hallum, ‘Collecting Men: Masculinity and Cultural Capital in The Woman in White’,}

Victorian Network, 4:1 (2012), 27-47 (p. 36).

17 _{Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and} Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 7-24 (p. 9). On the realities of collectors’ sexual and social selves, see Pearce, On Collecting, p. 227.

touch that prompt the nostalgic imagining of different kinds of queer and straight queer communities of book lovers across time.’18 _{Mills quotes Andrew Lang, a Scottish}

poet, novelist and critic who wrote several books on bibliomania, and who describes how ‘our fingers are faintly thrilled/ As we touch these books, with the far-off contact

of…hands’.19 _{Bibliophiles, in Mills’ reading, used tactile engagement with the books they}

collected to position themselves as part of a community with historical precedent. This re- reading of collectors’ corporeal deviancy is a significant step in reorienting our

conversations about the Victorian collector’s closeness to his things.

My reading of the collector’s deviant body suggests that any discussion of literary

representations of the nineteenth-century collector’s misplaced touch must be situated in the context of restricted touch in the ideal collection, i.e. the museum. I embark on this project in chapter three of this section by considering the works of Henry James, one of the most prolific and nuanced writers of collectors of the turn of the century. I situate James’s work in the context of nineteenth-century museum culture, which was partly responsible for the construction of a sensory paradigm in which the knowledge of the feeling body was denigrated in favour of the knowledge of the seeing eye. Considering the development of James’s depictions of collectors, I suggest that his ambiguous sketches of the ethics of collecting could be due to his interest in material epistemologies and the potential that the