Passions stamped on lifeless things: English romanticism and the poetics of the British Museum.

Abstract

Through a comparative consideration of the British Museum--Europe's first secular, national, and public museum--and selected poetry and prose from a broadly-defined Romantic era, the dissertation examines the institutional convergence between the ideological and the aesthetic, what I call the poetics of the British Museum. During the museum's first hundred years, from its foundation in 1753 and its first significant expansion during the Napoleonic era, through its reconceptualization under the reformist movements of the 1830s, and on to its consolidation as an institution of national cultural dissemination in the 1850s, representations of historical change, of social, national, and cultural ideals, and of individual and collective identity are realized in the museum's exhibitionary practice along with their attendant ambiguities and contradictions. I elucidate the ideologies of representation enacted in the British Museum by exploring exhibitionary paradigms informing selected writings of Edmund Burke, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin West, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among others, works that carry out the institutional, social, and political projects of the national museum in the subtler language of cultural articulations and representations. I compare these works with the minutes and correspondence from the meetings of the trustees, periodical literature of the time, comments of early visitors to the museum, and the acts and debates of Parliament surrounding the institution. Understanding the two denominative terms of the British Museum as fraught with cultural and social ambiguity, I argue that the movement of the museum's foundational collections from the private realm of connoisseurs, antiquarians, dilettantes, and men of science to the public realm of urban Bloomsbury instigated a crisis of representation. Far from being resolved, this crisis became the constitutive tension governing both the mounting and reception of the museum's exhibitions. The representational logic of the British Museum marks a shift from earlier modes of acquisition and exhibition to a self-reflexively ironic aesthetics of social forms correspondent with the rise of the modern nation state.