The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums by Nicola J. Watson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums by Nicola J. Watson Sean Silver (bio) Nicola J. Watson. The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 336. 25 illustrations. $40 hardcover. Nicola J. Watson’s rich, beautifully written new study offers itself as a guidebook. The Author’s Effects defines, then describes the institution of the writer’s house museum, single dwellings converted or purpose-built each to celebrate a single deceased author. Possibly like the guidebook itself, the author’s house museum is what Watson calls a “small genre”; each such museum is specially constructed to offer a walk-in experience of near contact with an absent author in a domestic space proper to them (7). These spaces are slightly fugitive, at least considered categorically. While it is true that fans of a particular author might know to seek out the museum dedicated to that author’s memory, and that guidebooks have long known how to organize tours around notable sites in local celebrities’ lives, the “writer’s house museum” is not a category recognized by any index, nor is there any central resource for finding them nor single associated professional organization. Partly as a result, no critical discussion of the author’s house museum exists. This is the gap filled by this book, written “to reflect upon the form of the writer’s house museum, given current historical, cultural, intellectual, and popular trends” (16). She visits them, and invites us to visit, too. Readers of Studies in Romanticism will probably be familiar with more than a few of the museums Watson visits: the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, where resides his skull and a reconstruction of his head; Rydal Mount and Gardens, the house cohabited by the diarist Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, William, for the last four decades of their lives; the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, in the rented room off the Piazza di Spagna where Keats spent his last days. So, too, these memorialized writers and their contemporaries were familiar with the first examples of the form: Keats had made his pilgrimage to the Shakespeare Birthplace Museum, where he scratched a memorial in the glass; Hawthorne had visited the Samuel Johnson House in Uttoxeter, which memory he recorded in print; Washington Irving visited Scott’s Abbotsford, the neo-Medieval castle Scott constructed as a monument to his body of work. The Romantic moment was a hingepoint in the establishment of thanatocentric tourism, what is sometimes called “necromanticisim”: the crossing of dead personalities with persistent places. The generation of the Romantic writers was the first both widely to seek out the sites of prior authors, and also to be memorialized in their turn. The Author’s Effects isn’t a history, however, and it doesn’t sustain a historical narrative. It offers only a brief discussion of why the institution of the author’s house museum sprung up in its modern form in late [End Page 237] eighteenth-century Europe and Britain. Some reasons explicitly mentioned include the political instability of the century’s last decades, which (Watson argues) drove a desire for the countervailing stability of iconic personal figures; the rise of secularized theories of immortality, signaled by the small genre of “graveyard writing”; and the development of tourism, especially to sites of particular cultural resonance and recognition. Other reasons are touched upon, but mostly left silent: the rise of nationalism and the nation-state; the emergence of the public and the public persons it tends to lionize; the evolution of biography, especially to capture the lives of poets; the development of a discourse around the remains of authors, marked by William Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres”; and the historical development of the public or semi-public museum, of which the British Museum is generally taken as the signal example, and which was, of course, visited and popularized by many of the people who would later have museums dedicated in their honor. Not a history, then, but a guidebook: The Author’s Effects begins with an exhortation to start the tour, and ends with an invitation to exit through the gift shop...