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    Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move
    Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move
    Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move
    Ebook275 pages7 hours

    Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

    By John Plotz

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 14, 2008
    ISBN9781400828937
    Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move
    Author

    John Plotz

    Time and the Tapestry is John Plotz's first children's book. He teaches English at Brandeis University and is the author of two scholarly books about Victorian literature, The Crowd and Portable Property. He rereads The Hobbit, Huck Finn, and A Wizard of Earthsea every year, and is now at work on a young adult novel about Mark Twain. He and his wife live in Brookline, MA, along with two daughters and four chickens.

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