Description
Book Synopsis"This book is... a romantic history of romantic collecting. It takes seriously, and by necessity shares, the tendency of romantic histories to dwell upon their own fragmentariness, on the impossibility of capturing an intact history.... It...
Trade ReviewPascoe's book, highly enjoyable and also nicely produced, meditates on the subterranean connections between the collecting passions of Romantic-era collectors and those of the poets, lines from whose poems they often quoted. Pascoe is insightful and playful in her explorations of the way private collectors, in the age between that of the great Renaissance princely or aristocratic cabinets of curiosity and the largely Victorian one of museums, were both fascinated by curious or beautiful material objects and rather poignantly used them to create what Henry James called a 'visitable' and Vernon Lee a 'companionable' past.
-- Elizabeth Helsinger * SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *
