Abstract
How do such factors as the choice and placement of objects, the presence of a glass barrier, installation design solutions, and contemporary sociopolitical issues affect a museum visitor’s experience of literary artefacts? How does the material culture historian’s scholarly rigour intersect with the museum visitor’s emotional response, and how does the museum curator—never a neutral presence—mediate between the two? This chapter probes these questions by examining the curatorial considerations that resulted in the display of Charlotte Brontë’s so-called Thackeray dress at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum in the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will. It concludes that scholarship and sentimentality, often considered antithetical, both inform a complex and humane response to material remnants displayed under glass.
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Notes
- 1.
Two-piece garment is known as Charlotte Brontë’s Thackeray dress. Printed delaine, 1850s. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth; D129.1–2.
- 2.
Virginia Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 166.
- 3.
Woolf to Violet Dickinson, 26 November 1904, in The Flight of the Mind, 158.
- 4.
Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 166.
- 5.
Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 166.
- 6.
Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 168.
- 7.
Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 167–68.
- 8.
Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 186.
- 9.
Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” 168.
- 10.
Branwell Brontë (1817–1848). Portrait of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, ca. 1834. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London, acquired in 1914; NPG 1725.
- 11.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, introductory gallery text for the exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, on view 30 September 2016–2 January 2017.
- 12.
Charlotte Brontë’s paintbox and portable writing desk. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth; H180 and H219.
- 13.
Brontë to William Smith Williams, 16 August 1849, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 235.
- 14.
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854; Henry D. Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Aesthetic Papers, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, ed., Boston: The editor; and New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849.
- 15.
Anne Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs, 60–65.
- 16.
Eleanor Houghton, “Unravelling the Mystery.”
- 17.
Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 12 June 1850, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 414.
- 18.
George Smith, A Memoir, 100.
- 19.
Draft of a letter from Brontë to Hartley Coleridge (December 1840), collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (MA 2696.31), published in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 236–239.
- 20.
Woolf, “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” 166.
- 21.
Holland Cotter, “Southern History, Unsugarcoated.”
- 22.
David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump Recorded.”
- 23.
Woolf, “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” 168.
- 24.
Brontë to Nussey, 7 November 1854, in Smith, Letters, vol. 3, 298.
- 25.
Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs, 65.
- 26.
Brontë to Nussey, 19? January 1847, in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 510.
- 27.
Manuscript copy of Brontë’s last will and testament, dated 17 February 1855, offered for probate, with proof of will dated 18 April 1855, and the official seal of the Commissary of the Exchequer and Prerogative Court of York, collection of the Morgan Library & Museum (MA 2696.47).
- 28.
Quoted by Robert Southey, Southey to Brontë, 12 March 1837, in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 166.
- 29.
Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 186.
- 30.
Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 187.
References
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Cotter, Holland. “Southern History, Unsugarcoated.” The New York Times, 19 December 2017. C1; published online 18 December 2017 as “The New Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Refuses to Sugarcoat History.” https://nyti.ms/2kIici3.
Fahrenthold, David A. “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005.” Washington Post, 8 October 2016 (video posted 7 October 2016). http://wapo.st/2dSXbkQ?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.5d39ceed060e.
Houghton, Eleanor. “Unravelling the Mystery: Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 ‘Thackeray Dress.’” Costume 50, no. 2 (2016): 194–219.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Chapters from Some Memoirs. London and New York: Macmillan, 1894.
Smith, George. A Memoir: With Some Pages of Autobiography. London: For Private Circulation, 1902.
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Woolf, Virginia. “Haworth, November 1904.” In Books and Portraits: Some Further Selections from the Literary and Biographical Writings of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Mary Lyon. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 4. New York: Harcourt, 1994.
Woolf, Virginia. “Woolf to Violet Dickinson, November 26, 1904.” In The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson assisted by Joanne Trautmann Banks. Vol. 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975.
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Nelson, C. (2020). Brontë Under Glass: Scholarship and Sentimentality in the Museum Context. In: Pizzo, J., Houghton, E. (eds) Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_7
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