The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors

Abstract

Romantic collecting is a lacuna between the well-ploughed fields of Victorian institutions, early modern cabinets of curiosities and Enlightenment museums. Judith Pascoe's The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors offers fresh ways of thinking about Romantic objects, their lives and afterlives. In her earlier monograph Romantic Theatricality, Pascoe challenged an anti-theatrical Romantic canon that had dismissed the Romantic stage in favour of the theatres of the mind. Now she turns to the Romantics’ inability to ‘class the cabinet’ of their sensations and goes on to argue with Colin Campbell that the seemingly incompatible activities of poetry and collecting paradoxically share an ethos of ‘Wordsworthian modes of longing (for permanence, immortality, pleasure, recognition)’ (p. 4). Yet words or discourses are not Pascoe's starting point; her enquiry begins with the objects themselves: Percy Shelley's guitar, William Bullock's hummingbird cabinet, Queen Charlotte's herbarium and library, Napoleon's carriage, Giovanni...

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