The Enticing Elusiveness of Things: Objects and Collectors in Richard Marsh's Curios (1898)

Abstract

This essay explores the fictional representations of objects in Richard Marsh's Curios: The Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898), a collection of tales in which things come alive in many ways, calling for a more nuanced approach than that allowed by commodity criticism. Marsh's objects are in fact sites of intersection between issues of identity, professional expertise, and relations between individuals. In my essay, I focus on three main aspects, all deeply informed by the author's exploration of the importance of sensorial perception in human-thing relations: the issue of evidence, the assessment of value, and the concepts of ownership and circulation. My point is to demonstrate that Marsh's stories foreground a mixed attitude towards collectors, and deploy a way of representing objects that emphasises the uncanny power they can exert on humans, but also the wealth of imaginative and sensorial possibilities they offer. Although much stress is given to the elusiveness of specific objects, these tales also show an amused awareness that material things will always escape us, but this very quality is what makes them interesting and worth pursuing.