The hummingbird cabinet
Subtitle: a rare and curious history of romantic collectors
By: Judith Pascoe.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Ithaca, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 222
ISBN-13: 9780801443626
Subjects: Collectors and collecting -- England -- History -- 19th century.; Romanticism -- England -- History -- 19th century.; English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
Description: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the activity of collecting became democratised and popularised, allowing all kinds of people to become caught up in the collecting obsessions of the period: birds, books, Napoleonic relics, botanical specimens, Egyptiana, and fossils. She links the collecting craze during the period with the subsequent fetishization of romantic poets and their possessions, revealing the extent to which an ongoing fascination with material objects—with Keats's hair and Shelley's guitar, for example—helped to produce an enduring image of these poets as spiritual emissaries of a less materialistic age. Judith Pascoe maintains that romanticism as a literary movement played a crucial supporting role in varied attempts by collectors of this era to fashion identities for themselves through collecting. She makes the case that the romantic period stands out as a distinct moment in collecting history, a transition between the flourishing of the Renaissance wonder cabinet and the rise of the Victorian museum.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The last guitar Shelley ever played; title: Hummingbird collectors and romantic poetry; title: Queen Charlotte, collector and collectible; title: Travels with Napoleon's carriage; title: Belzoni in ruins; title: Mary Anning recollected; title: Lights out for the romantic collectors.