Furniture

Chapter 4 looks at how objects have been assembled into narratives of the scene of writing, conventionally composed in microcosm of the author’s chair, desk, pen, ink, and paper as witness to the act of writing. It explores what we have invested in the scene of writing, how it bears on the construction of the figure of the author, and how chairs, desks, and desk furniture come to be conceived, valued, represented, and staged as the ‘home’ of writing. It investigates (amongst other important instances) the long-standing celebrity of Shakespeare’s chairs and Jane Austen’s desks as a prehistory to the more recent display of Daphne du Maurier’s desk at Jamaica Inn in Cornwall.

Outhouses

Chapter 7 forays into visionary spaces occupied by writers beyond the domestic. It explores how the processes of writing are imagined within, and more usually beyond, the everyday domestic, with time outside the public hours of the day, and space behind, above, or beyond the public spaces of the house. With special reference to William Cowper’s summerhouse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s hermitage at Ermenonville, Henry Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond, Alexandre Dumas’ Gothic folly, and Vita Sackville-West’s tower at Sissinghurst, it considers how writers have dramatized the writing life as an enviable life of the imagination led beyond the everyday and the ordinary, enabling it to plunge its roots deep into wider, national landscapes.

Exit through the gift shop

Chapter 9 turns its attention from museum objects and spaces to museum visitors, tracing the history of how readers have behaved at writer’s houses and how they have interacted with objects, spaces, and each other. It thus completes the book’s trajectory from the author’s body to that of the reader. It outlines and details nineteenth-century tourist sentimental practices and experiments at sites associated with Petrarch, Rousseau, and Shakespeare. It looks at what tourists brought with them, what they left behind, and what they took away with them. It concludes by describing the writer’s house museum as not so much the scene of writing as the scene of (disavowed) reading.

Household effects

Chapter 5 widens the focus beyond the staging of the immediate scene of writing to develop a taxonomy of the ways that domestic objects and spaces have been made to bear witness to the writer’s life and work through inscription, caption, and representations of the author in life-size effigy or statue. It canvases objects that bear witness to authorial biography such as Johnson’s coffee-pot, explores how (and why) objects may choose instead to materialize the author’s writing, as in the Hans Christian Andersen museum in Odense, the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove, and the Mikhail Bulgakov museum in Kiev, and investigates how life-size representations of the adult author have been used in the Hannibal, Missouri Twain Boyhood Museum and in Lichfield to ‘remember’ childhood homes.

Remains

Chapter 1 explores the smallest-scale expression of the writer’s house museum, the reliquary, through investigating the history of affective investment in the remains of the authorial body. The discussion is framed and exemplified by the biographies of Robert Burns’ skull and John Keats’ hair, but also touches upon ways in which the mortal remains of Ariosto, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Schiller have been imagined and preserved. The chapter discusses the ways in which the mortal likeness of authors was preserved and transmitted by admirers through acquiring authors’ bones, making casts of their skulls, taking life and death masks, and taking, gifting, and displaying authors’ hair.

Enchanted ground

Chapter 8 explores the ways that nineteenth-century writers constructed houses as ‘enchanted ground’ to display their own mythos as national writers. It argues that these houses initiate and model the very concept of the writer’s house as museum, modelling how the writer’s physical and imaginative life work in mysterious symbiosis and amalgamation. It argues further that such houses—and their ‘enchanted grounds’—dramatized the way the writer’s imagination has saved and reanimated the hitherto mute detritus of the nation’s past. It focuses on Walter Scott’s self-dramatization at Abbotsford and the transatlantic portability of that model in Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, and concludes by looking at a modern reiteration of some of these ideas in the redevelopment of Shakespeare’s New Place for the 400th anniversary of his death in 2016.

Clothing

Chapter 3 investigates ways of figuring the author’s doubled body, physical and textual, through clothing. It contrasts the ways that male and female authorial clothing has been imagined and displayed within the writer’s house museum to animate ideas of the author. It discusses, inter alia, Dorothy Wordsworth’s shoes, William Cowper’s nightcap, Henrik Ibsen’s top-hat, Elizabeth Gaskell’s shawl, Charlotte Brontë’s wedding-bonnet, and Emily Dickinson’s white dress. It argues that the display of clothing within the writer’s museum converts writing into biography. In this common museum trope, clothing is seen to take and preserve the most intimate and truthful form of its wearer, and to survive as witness to it. Clothing displaces the intimacy and truth of writing; text is converted into textile.

Bodies

Chapter 2 considers alternative evocations of the author’s body, focusing on how and why animal-bodies in the form of taxidermied remains are deployed as surrogates for the figure of the author within the writer’s house museum. It tours Arqua, Olney, London, Philadelphia, Coxwold, and Amherst in pursuit of the stories and fantasies old and new that lie behind the celebrity of Petrarch’s cat, Cowper’s hares, Poe’s raven, Sterne’s starling, and Dickinson’s hummingbirds. It argues that these animals serve to describe the doubled body of the author, at once dead and alive, mortal and immortal, body and voice, corpse and textual corpus.

Introduction

This chapter introduces an enquiry into the writer’s house museum as an idea and cultural form, arguing that it begins to emerge in the late eighteenth century as a widespread phenomenon. Starting from the working hypothesis that such museums are primarily designed to effect a figure of the author through the preservation and display of belongings within quasi-domestic space, it opens an investigation into the ways that authorial remains, possessions, and spaces came to remediate and locate the simultaneous materiality/immateriality of the author in ways that typically conceived place as national. It sites its investigation within current scholarship, defines terms, lays out a methodology, offers a guide to the remainder of the book, and argues its timeliness.

Glass

Chapter 6 meditates upon the function of glass as a medium of ‘enchantment’ in the writer’s house museum. It considers how and to what effect objects are co-located and assembled within the vitrine as the basic meme of the museum and, with special reference to Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Old Manse, and Sigmund Freud’s apartment in Vienna, how eye-glasses, windows, and mirrors relate to tropes of authorial vision and authorial invisibility and immateriality. It argues that glass is the material by which the museum thinks through, dramatizes, and fetishizes impossibilities: the desire to see the writer in the flesh, the desire to see what the writer once saw; the desire to share the writer’s vision.