Lanterna Rally

Author: Emma Rosalind Peacocke

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13:

Public museums and romantic writing emerged side by side in Britain. My thesis deals with various texts' uses of the new institution of the museum, as shorthand, allegory, or arena of discussion for the ways in which regency society was changing. The three major bodies of theory that inform my work are cultural theory, book history, and museum theory. The first chapter explores one of the germinal texts of romantic poetry, Wordsworth's The Prelude . The idea of a public gallery underlies Wordsworth's description of seeing Charles Le Brun's Penitent Magdalene canvas. The second chapter focuses on Walter Scott's 1814 novel, Waverley. The narrator views the novel's portraits forensically, and discredits them as historical documents. His critical knowledge belongs not to the 1745 setting of Waverley , but to early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, when public art exhibitions commenced. The third chapter is on Maria Edgeworth's Harrington (1817). Harrington is the story of two collections competing to form the hero's mind: the benevolent, Jewish Mr. Montenero's art collection, which he uses to preserve the British ruling class, and the Mowbray collection, which incarnates anti-semitism. A crucial scene takes place in the proto-museum of the Tower of London. When the British Museum purchased the Elgin Marbles in 1816, it intensified a polarized debate over the collection's proper ownership - and created one of the first mass audiences for any museum. The final chapter examines the Marbles' presence in periodical literature, comparing the pirating of Byron's Curse of Minerva (first published 1815) in the New Monthly Magazine with the publishing of Horace Smith's "The Phidias Room" in the London Magazine in 1821. My conclusion jumps ahead to E.W. Hornung's short story, "A Jubilee Present" (1901), which features a robbery of the British Museum. Hornung's lighthearted portrayal of criminals as patriots shows how the public virtues of the museum - which literary romanticism did so much to instill throughout regency culture - were so established by the late Victorian era that they had become the basis for a gentle joke.