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Full Description
What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly.
Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi Preface: Getting Hold of Portable Property xiii INTRODUCTION: The Global, the Local, and the Portable 1 CHAPTER ONE: Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value 24 CHAPTER TWO: The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability Abroad 45 CHAPTER THREE: Someone Else's Knowledge: Race and Portable Culture in Daniel Deronda 72 CHAPTER FOUR: Locating Lorna Doone: R. D. Blackmore, F. H. Burnett, and the Limits of English Regionalism 93 CHAPTER FIVE: Going Local: Characters and Environments in Thomas Hardy's Wessex 122 CHAPTER SIX: Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris's Romances 144 CONCLUSION: Is Portability Portable? 170 Notes 183 Bibliography 235 Index 257
