Brontë Under Glass: Scholarship and Sentimentality in the Museum Context

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 Bronte’s so-called Thackeray dress at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum in the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Bronte: 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.