The Collector's Voice

Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting: Volume 3: Modern Voices

Susan Pearce, Rosemary Flanders, Fiona Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781859284193
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351964067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Collector's Voice is a major four-volume project which brings together in accessible form material relevant to the history and practice of collecting in the European tradition from c. 1500 BC to the present day. The series demonstrates how attitudes to objects, the collecting of objects, and the shape of the museum institution have developed over the past 3000 years. Material presented includes translations of a wide range of original documents: letters, official reports, verse, fiction, travellers' accounts, catalogues and labels. Volume 1: Ancient Voices, edited by Susan Pearce and Alexandra Bounia Volume 2: Early Voices, edited by Susan Pearce and Kenneth Arnold Volume 3: Imperial Voices, edited by Susan Pearce and Rosemary Flanders Volume 4: Contemporary Voices, edited by Susan Pearce and Paul Martin

Part IV
Literary Voices

33

Charles Dickens: Bleak House

Charles Dickens (1812–70) remains acclaimed as one of England’s finest writers and one whose quantity of output did not seriously impair its quality. He came from a poor background and was sufficiently self-taught to become a journalist for a London newspaper, from which he expanded to a number of periodicals. He used this outlet to publish his stories, thus making them cheap and accessible, and himself popular.

His first novel appeared in 1836–37, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (more popularly the Pickwick Papers), a delightfully picaresque excursion of comic exuberance. The antiquarian-collecting impulse does not escape Dicken’s attention and Chapter 11 deals with Pickwick’s discovery of an inscribed stone (which he quickly buys for posterity). Inconclusive scholarship follows at an international level and all agree it is significant. None of them will have any truck with the disbeliever who interviews the man who carved, in an idle moment, upon the undoubtedly ancient stone. Dickens was perhaps familiar with Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) which includes a similar incident. Volume 1, Chapter 4 tells of two antiquaries who discover an inscribed stone that they take to be evidence of Agricola’s passing. This is much to the humour of a knowledgeable old tramp who can remember the mason who cut it twenty years previously. Both stories show a delight in deflating antiquarian pomposity and high-mindedness and a clearly perceived lack of common sense. It is light-hearted but still points up the obsessive side of collecting and the prestige it can bring from one’s peers.

Three of Dicken’s other novels and a short story also cast an illuminating light on notions of collecting, on a broader social and economic scale: Our Mutual Friend (1865), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Bleak House (1853) and A Christmas Carol (1843). The last named presents a searing but finally hopeful portrayal of collecting avarice in the shape of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Much harsher portrayals of collecting as avarice are found in the other three works. In The Old Curiosity Shop, a small fortune is amassed from the keeping of the shop of the title, a receptacle for ‘old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their rusty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust’ (p. 47). In Our Mutual Friend one of the supporting characters earns his living by collecting corpses from the River Thames. More principally we have Mr Harmon who has made a fortune from collecting dust. One of the heaps is to go to his employee, Mr Boffin and the rest to Harmon’s son John. Boffin inherits all when John is presumed to have drowned, and becomes the Golden Dustman. In those heaps he also hides treasure of his own.

Perhaps the most important of the tales for our interest in collecting is Bleak House, from which the following extract is taken. This is Dickens’s fullest portrait of collecting as commerce. In it we follow the protracted legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce on its tortuous and blighting journey through Chancery. In it we meet Mr Krooks, a landlord and proprietor of Krooks Rag and Bottle Shop. To his customers and neighbours however he is known as the Lord Chancellor, and his shop the Court of Chancery, because of the huge number of documents he houses there, despite his inability to read. He is a pawnbroker writ large who collects whatever he can lay his hands on, using the information to be derived from it to serve his interest. His collection extends beyond documents to locks of hair and cat-skins and other, more mundane, classes of artefact. This is collecting to acquire knowledge, and knowledge is power, particularly when kept secret and exclusive.

COLLECTING AS COMMERCE

It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by, that we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments, before she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the Inn, and said, ‘This is my lodging. Pray walk up!’

She had stopped at a shop, over which was written, KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window, were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles: I am reminded by mentioning the latter, that the shop had, in several little particulars, the air of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled ‘Law Books, all at 9rf.’ Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office, and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and despatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr Krook within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door, lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls, and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upward, like some old root in a fall of snow.

‘Hi hi!’ said the old man coming to the door. ‘Have you anything to sell?’

We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her pocket, and to whom Richard now said, that, as we had had the pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up, and see her apartment for an instant; and was so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired; that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious; — at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers, and said, ‘Aye, aye! Please her! It won’t take a minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the shop, if t’other door’s out of order!’ we all went in, stimulated by Richard’s laughing encouragement, and relying on his protection.

‘My landlord, Krook,’ said the little old lady, condescending to him from her lofty station, as she presented him to us. ‘He is called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!’

She shook her head a great many times, and tapped her forehead with her finger, to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse him, ‘For he is a little — you know! — M — !’ said the old lady, with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.

‘It’s true enough,’ he said, going before us with the lantern, ‘that they call me the Lord Chancellor, and call my shop Chancery. And why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor, and my shop Chancery?’

‘I don’t know, I am sure!’ said Richard, rather carelessly.

‘You see,’ said the old man, stopping and turning round, ‘they – Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!’

That’ll do, my good friend!’ said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. ‘You can admire as the rest of us do, without taking that liberty.’

The old man darted at him a sudden look, which even called my attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady herself. But as Ada interposed, and laughingly said she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.

‘You see I have so many things here,’ he resumed, holding up the lantern, ‘of so many kinds, and all, as the neighbours think (but they know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that’s why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. And all’s fish that comes to my net. And I can’t abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do they know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That’s the way I’ve got the ill name of Chancery, /don’t mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don’t notice me, but I notice him. There’s no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane! ‘

A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his shoulder, and startled us all.

‘Hi! show ‘em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my lady!’ said her master.

The cat leaped down, and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.

‘She’d do as much for any one I was to set her on,’ said the old man. ‘I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was offered to me. It’s a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn’t have it stripped off! That warn’t like Chancery practice though, says you!’

He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him before passing out:

‘That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in Jarndyce.’

‘Jarndyce!’ said the old man with a start.

‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook,’ returned his lodger.

‘Hi!’ exclaimed the old man, in a tone of thoughtful amazement, and with a wider stare than before. ‘Think of it! ‘

He seemed so rapt all in a moment, and looked so curiously at us, that Richard said:

‘Why you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other Chancellor! ‘

‘Yes,’ said the old man abstractedly. ‘Sure! Your name now will be-’

‘Richard Carstone.’

‘Carstone,’ he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention, upon a separate finger. ‘Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think.’

‘He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!’ said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.

‘Ay!’ said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. ‘Yes! Tom Jarndyce – you’ll excuse me, being related; but he was never known about court by any other name, and was as well known there, as – she is now;’ nodding slightly at his lodger; ‘Tom Jarndyce was often in here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers, and telling ‘em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. “For,” says he, “it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.” He was as near making away with himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could be.’

Source

Dickens, C., 1853 (1991), Bleak House, London, Mandarin: 51–55.

References

Ackroyd, 1991

Dickens, 1841 (1985)

34

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone

William ‘Wilkie’ Collins (1824–89) was a prolific Victorian novelist whose works are once more in vogue. His father was a dealer in and restorer of paintings and he launched his son into a career as a painter. He became a Royal Academician and did indeed make a good living out of painting, mostly landscapes. But he desired to write and so changed tack and settled on an authorial career in which he was determined to make an equally good living.

The Moonstone (1868) remains his most popular and widely acclaimed work (along with The Woman in White). It is regarded as the first British detective novel, after T. S. Eliot’s comment to that effect: ‘The first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels –’ (quoted in the Introduction to The Moonstone, p. 7). The title of the novel is the same as that of the diamond at the heart of the story, which tells of its theft and the solving of the criminal puzzle that this creates. We are, then, in the realms of treasure and the possessive, collecting thirst such material always generates in the dramatic context of fiction. For an alternative, secretive and scatological view of treasure, see Sarah Wintle’s introduction to Kipling’s Puck of Pook Hill (1987: 29–34). At this level it conforms to the collecting conventions of numerous other novels (and films). What gives this work added interest is the broader context it portrays as an imperial or colonial narrative of the British empire. The book opens with a prologue in which we learn the history of the Indian diamond and its theft by a British soldier at the storming of Seringapatam in 1799. This one theft, this one act of aggression, unifies the individual and the nation in the same act of possession; collecting the diamond is collecting the country. It does also recognise that this motivation is older than the British empire. Thus we learn that in the eleventh century the Mohammadan conqueror, Mahmood of Ghizni, sacked the Hindu city of Somnauth and its fabulous temple treasury, which included the Moonstone, though this was saved at the last minute. Moved to Benares, 700 years later the Moguls indulged in its sacking and the diamond was stolen. It passed to the Sultan of Seringapatam, who had it set in the hilt of a dagger and added to his treasury-armoury. Throughout the rest of the novel move three Hindus (intent on recovering the holy diamond for the head of the moon-god it formerly occupied), following all who come into contact with the diamond.

The extract comes from the prologue and is a graphic example of collecting greed. The precious object is equated with wealth, but we can also see its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General preface to series
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I National voices
• II Institutional declarations
• III Voices from the beyond
• IV Literary voices
• V Dark voices
• Bibliography
• Index