The Global , the Local , and the Portable

ONE UNIVERSALLY acknowledged truth about the Victorians is that they loved their things.1 Deborah Cohen has recently argued that in nineteenthcentury England moral uplift came for the first time to be associated with the accumulation and harmonious arrangement of possessions; homedecoration turned into a saintly affair.2 The objects that pack Victorian parlors—aquaria, terraria, globes, books, and beetle collections among them—might seem to make bourgeois life into a collector’s paradise, an alternative to ever quitting the home.3 However, the titles of popular works such as Friedrich Ernst’s The Portable Gymnasium, John Bartholo­ mew’s Portable Atlas, and Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica, or The Por­ table Flower Garden prompt us to tell the story slightly differently.4 So, too, does a revealing fact: when possessions fill Victorian novels—so copi­ ously that later readers describe themselves as swaddled by, drowning in, or suffocating under their weight—they generally serve not as static deadweights, but as moving messengers. Aquaria or collector’s cabinets might be the Victorian repositories of choice, but the objects that fill them—bugs, mourning rings, or precious letters—acquire meaning pri­ marily from their earlier peregrinations. These are a few of their favorite things: Shakespeare’s complete plays; an Indian pearl necklace sold to buy a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Works; some unlabelled beetles bound for the British Museum; a monogrammed silver teapot; an Indian diamond with a “moony glow”; a Kashmiri shawl; a grandfather’s chest of documents in various languages; a ruby ring, its provenance carved upon it in Farsi; an embroidered handkerchief in a silver box.5 My argument is that Victorian novels made much of such objects, returned to them repeatedly, and interrogated their significance in a variety of puzzling ways, because of the novel’s own status as an exemplary portable property. Themselves sentimentalized items, en­ dowed with a fiscal and a transcendent value at once, English novels from the 1830s onwards took on the project of making sense of resonant but potentially marketable objects.6 They did so because so much of the novel’s own cultural importance derived from its status as a text caught between fungibility and irreplace­ ability. In this introduction, I offer brief readings from novels by Eliot, Gaskell, and Oliphant, so as to explore three distinct ways that novels © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.