Curating the object: Art collection and aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain

This dissertation explores influential art critics, poets and novelists who—contra Oscar Wilde’s famous claim that “all art is quite useless”—affirmed the “use” of art to human care and cultivation. By turning art and other artifacts into things to be acquired and arranged, mid-Victorian collectors transformed “Arts and Crafts” into a fashionable cult of the objet d’art. For instance, Charles Eastlake’s decorating manual, Hints on Household Taste (1868), beckoned readers to create the private museum as a self-contained “thing of beauty.” The writers I discuss rejected this fantasy of autonomous art and drew on John Ruskin’s legacy to develop a social understanding of the aesthetic object. By the nineteenth century, the meanings of the “curator” (a caretaker of things) and the “curate” (a healer of souls) had drifted far from their common Latin root, curare (to heal or to care). By contrast, Margaret Oliphant’s series novels, Robert Browning’s verse, Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction, and Wilde’s essays realigned these terms to suggest a model of curatorship which connected the care of beautiful objects to the care of others and the care of the self.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Dickison, Carrie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Saville, Julia F.
• Goodlad, Lauren M.E.
• Courtemanche, Eleanor
• Nazar, Hina

• aestheticism, nineteenth-century aesthetics, Victorian literature

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Carrie Dickison

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106409

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/106409