BOOK REVIEW: Jordanna Bailkin.THE CULTURE OF PROPERTY: THE CRISIS OF LIBERALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN. and David Wayne Thomas.CULTIVATING VICTORIANS: LIBERAL CULTURE AND THE AESTHETIC.

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, and: Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic Jonah Siegel (bio) The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, by Jordanna Bailkin; pp. xii + 320. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, $35.00, £24.50. Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic, by David Wayne Thomas; pp. xv + 229. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, $45.00. Each of these studies may be recommended as a soft-spoken yet effective corrective to influential ideas of liberal values that have been more often assumed than clearly established. While Jordanna Bailkin complicates notions of property, especially cultural property, in relation to dominant and subordinate groups, David Wayne Thomas attempts to engage the frequently unspoken, but nevertheless influential notion that the cultivation of the individual is best understood as a mystified subjugation of the self quite contrary to the aspiration for individual autonomy with which it is often associated. While we have become accustomed to simple assertions of the essentially political nature of all aesthetic controversies, Jordanna Bailkin offers an incontestable and extremely interesting version of the relationship. Indeed, the underlying question driving her project is compelling: what might the idea of cultural property, of material that cannot be disposed of according to the individual will, do to a politics, like that of Britain, that has relied so heavily on the support of property rights for its validation? Bailkin, like Thomas, has a surprising amount on the table. Her goal is not simply to trace to earlier sources an intersection of ethics and ownership that can seem so characteristic of the twentieth century, but to do so in order "to illuminate the crisis of Liberal ideals and practices" in Britain before the First World War (1). The vexed nature of the idea of cultural property is developed most compellingly in the course of Bailkin's rich and textured discussion of the disposition of a quantity of Celtic gold found in a field in Ireland in 1896 and sold to the British Museum. Bailkin traces the debate over the "return" of the material—not to the person who unearthed it or to the person on whose property it was found, or even to the area where it was discovered (Derry), but to the Dublin Museum of Science and Art. As in her discussion of the National Gallery of Scotland—though she is commendably nuanced in her treatment of regional difference—Bailkin's analysis illustrates the paradoxes bound to emerge when concepts of national identity clash with the political fact of Union. Ultimately, the gold is indeed "returned" to a place it had never been before, which might seem a sort of nationalist victory but for the fact that the restitution is carried out as a magnanimous act of King Edward, so in that sense it validates, rather than contradicts, imperial rule. As this instance will indicate, Bailkin's exposition is detailed and subtle. As such, it allows her to identify important ancillary developments, such as the influence of this particular controversy on the emergence of popular ideas of Celtic art. The treatment of the National Gallery of Scotland, though it does not have quite so colorful a crisis to build on, similarly dwells on the complex problem of national identity, national stereotype, and art. Was the function of the gallery in Edinburgh to mark the city's role as a center of culture—and therefore to offer a selection of European masterpieces—or was it somehow to mark itself as distinctly Scottish? If the latter, what might it mean to be Scottish, [End Page 309] and how might a symbol of Scottish identity, however constituted, validate itself when its funding was provided by England? A key instance in the book is the duke of Norfolk's announced sale in 1909 of Hans Holbein's Christina of Denmark (1538), a work that since 1880 had been on loan to the National Gallery in London, and which it was feared would be purchased by a deep- pocketed American. As Bailkin demonstrates, two versions of liberalism clashed in the debate the sale provoked; the traditional liberal commitment to...