Abstract
Architectural historians have traditionally criticised nineteenth-century architecture for its ‘literary’ quality, arguing that its significance results from an abject subordination to historical and literary association rather than, as it supposedly should, from pure form. In The Architecture of Humanism (1914), for example, Geoffrey Scott identified a ‘literary fallacy’ in romantic architecture, which he claimed ‘neglects the fact that in literature, meaning, or fixed association, is the universal term; while in architecture the universal term is the sensuous experience of substance and form.’1 Or, as Robert Furneaux Jordan puts it: ‘Mere form or structure — the first of which has been dominant in the eighteenth century and the second of which was to be dominant in the twentieth century — were altogether subordinate to this passionate embracement of the Imagination.’2 The practice of literary tourism, which emerges at precisely the same time that literature supposedly killed architecture, suggests that objects’ and buildings’ associative qualities might enhance, rather than subordinate, their material qualities.3 Association can open up the very thing Geoffrey Scott suggests it destroys, ‘the sensuous experience of substance and form.’ I will explore this claim through considering two building projects: Sir Walter Scott’s building of his house Abbotsford in the Borders, and the renovations to The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts carried out by its owner, the American author (and visitor to Abbotsford) Nathaniel Hawthorne. These two house building projects demonstrate two very different reactions to the practice of literary tourism, a revelling in its architectural possibilities in Scott’s case and a retreat from them in Hawthorne’s, but both reveal a commitment to association’s possibility to awaken architectural and material form.
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Notes
Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, rev. edn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 62.
Robert Furneaux Jordan, Victorian Architecture (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 48.
The literature on literary tourism, like that on nineteenth-century architecture, demonstrates a tension between the materiality of authors’ houses and their immaterial literary associations. Stephen Bann examines literary tourism through Washington Irving’s essay ‘Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey’ in a larger study of representations of history in the romantic period, identifying a renewed cultural investment in the material environment during this historical period. In her compelling and comprehensive study of the phe-nomenon of literary tourism, Nicola Watson argues that the literary text is the driving factor in literary tourism: visits to literary sites, with their inability to concretise the authorial imagination or the reveries of reading, are, for Watson, affairs of absence. Stephen Bann, ‘The Historical Composition of Place: Byron and Scott’ in The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 93–111
Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 11.
See Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 147–207
James Macauley, The Gothic Revival, 1745–1845 (Glasgow: Blackie and Son Ltd., 1975), 223–8
Iain Gordon Brown, ed., Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott: The Image and the Influence (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003).
John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, rev. edn, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 121–6.
J.A. Andersen, A Dane’s Excursions in Britain, vol. 2 (London: Printed for Mathews & Leigh by W.Clowes, 1809), 25.
Washington Irving, ‘Abbotsford’ in The Crayon Miscellany (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 143.
Mary Monica Maxwell-Scott, Abbotsford. The Personal Relics and Antiquarian Treasures of Sir Walter Scott (London: A. and C. Black, 1893), 63.
Samuel Smiles, ed. James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1883), 85.
John Morrison, ‘Random Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott,’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 10 (1843): 569–78, 576.
George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, vol. 1 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1876), 283.
Krzystof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge and London: Polity Press, 1990), 9, 23.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 341, 538.
See Vincent Scully, The Shingle and Stick Style, rev. edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971).
Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, eds, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864–1876, vol. 10 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909–1914), 40.
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© 2009 Erin Hazard
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Hazard, E. (2009). The Author’s House: Abbotsford and Wayside. In: Watson, N.J. (eds) Literary Tourism and Nineteenth- Century Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_6
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