In the face of financial disaster, Dr Lydgate attempts to share his concerns with his
wife, Rosamund, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871). Rosamund's refusal to
engage with the crisis, or to sympathise with her husband's despair, is repeatedly
presented by Eliot as a preoccupation with inanimate, decorative objects:
Rosamund 'turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece'. 1 The mid nineteenth-century
novel increasingly explores what it means to own, collect and
display objects, and how personal and public lives can be constructed and defined
by 'things'.
Recent critical discussion has examined the significance of the Great
Exhibition in London in 1851, and the subsequent international exhibitions, as a
catalyst for, and an expression of, new ways of producing and consuming objects. 2
These dazzling exhibitions, in conjunction with the foundation of the South
Kensington Museum (1857), began to formulate principles of design and models
of taste for the public. Increasingly influential, however, was the development of
the smaller, regional museum collections of decorative objects which began to
emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most of these shared with
their national counterparts an intention to educate the public; almost all retained the intimacy and distinct authoring of their roots with local collectors.
This thesis draws together common impulses from real and fictional
evidence to suggest ways in which people's relationships to their objects were
becoming increasingly sophisticated and intimate. It explores the growing role of
local municipal museums in presenting manufactured and decorative pieces, in
reinforcing moral and social messages around collecting and display, and in
popularising decorative 'things' in the home and beyond, while also examining the
growing fictional fascination with, and the increasing visibility of, objects in the
novel.