Spectacle, exoticism, and display in the gentleman's house: The fonthill auction of 1822

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 543-563

  Richter, Anne Nellis ^a  

^a NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART   (United States)

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EID: 67649972493     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. The second printing of the catalog indicates that the date of the auction was subsequently moved to 8 October 1822.
2. John Britton, Graphical and Literary Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1823), 15.
3. Important to my understanding of early nineteenth-century periodical literature is Jon Klancher's The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
4. On the political leanings of prominent journals at this time, see John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802-1824 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968).
5. I have found a number of studies extremely useful for thinking about developments in the British economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A classic work on this subject is Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: The Making of Modern English Society, vol. 1, 1530-1780 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), esp. 184-95.
6. Also important are Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (1978; repr., Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2004);
7. Appleby, "Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought," in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993);
8. and R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).
9. There is an excellent discussion of these issues in Erin Mackie, Market à la mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and the Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), as they pertain to the early eighteenth century.
10. Biographical accounts of William Beckford's life are numerous and take a variety of approaches. The substantial body of work on Beckford's life and activities as a collector and writer has tended to revolve around Beckford's compelling personality, while the Fonthill auction has generally been characterized as just one of many scenes in the Beckfordian melodrama. See Tim Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998);
11. Malcolm Jack, William Beckford: An English Fidalgo (New York: AMS Press, 1996);
12. Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London: Faber & Faber, 1979);
13. Boyd Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son (London: Centaur Press, 1962);
14. Guy Chapman, Beckford (New York: Scribner's, 1937);
15. J. W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932)
16. and Sacheverell Sitwell, Beckford and Beckfordism: An Essay (London: Duckworth, 1930).
17. See Mowl, William Beckford, and Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son, for further details.
18. Beckford is quoted as referring to the structure as a "pleasure-building" in John Wilton-Ely, "The Genesis and Evolution of Fonthill Abbey," Architectural History 23 (1980): 42.
19. "Visit to Fonthill," Literary Gazette (1822), 527.
20. Wilton-Ely, "Genesis," 47-48.
21. An excellent source for details on the auction is Frank Herrmann's The English as Collectors: A Documentary Sourcebook (London: John Murray, 1999), 210-19.
22. Jeannie Chapel, "William Beckford: Collector of Old Master Paintings, Drawings, and Prints," in, William Beckford, 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, ed. Derek E. Ostergard (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 232-35.
23. Beckford's achievements in various fields of collecting have been examined in Ostergard, William Beckford, the catalog of an important exhibition about his life and collecting practice. Quote from "A Day at Fonthill Abbey," New Monthly Magazine, (1822), 374. (Hereafter cited as "DFA.")
24. Very few, if any, views exist of the interior as it appeared before the auction. The problems with reconstructing the interior have also been noted by Bet McLeod, "A Celebrated Collector," in Ostergard, William Beckford: 155-75, 161. McLeod's article is the best source for information on the display of objects at Fonthill Abbey.
25. Cynthia Wall argues, "the auction, as a public place of sale, is as much a theatrical performance, a spectacle, as it is a commercial event, and the bidders are not simply purchasers but simultaneously part of both performance and audience" ("The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings," Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.1 [1997]: 18).
26. On the relationship between codes of viewing and the country house, see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003).
27. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).
28. For an overview of attitudes toward the country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 23-45.
29. The very notion of the picturesque English countryside in this period was one packaged to appeal to nostalgic urban audiences, who were comforted by the idea of a stable and timeless rural culture. See Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
30. For a history of the village see Richard Dewhurst, Crosstracks to Hindon (Salisbury: Hobnob Press, 2005).
31. Jon Klancher, "Discriminations, or Romantic Cosmopolitanism in London," in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005).
32. For a general survey of the state of London political and cultural life in the early nineteenth century, see the exhibition catalog London: World City, 1800-1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992).
33. Wiltshire Gazette, 2 October 1822. (Hereafter cited as WG.)
34. The Wiltshire Gazette's writer's concern echoes accounts of masquerades written throughout the eighteenth century, which, as Terry Castle has argued, were "persistently associated with diabolical foreign influence, imported corruption, the dangerous breach of national boundaries, contamination from without" (Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Eiction [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986], 7).
35. Country fairs had long been seen as places where "provincial habits" were disrupted by cosmopolitanism, transforming what would ordinarily be an innocent country carnival by virtue of the dissimulation and aristocratic license associated with "masquerade"; see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 37.
36. On entertainment venues in London, see the now-classic Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1978).
37. As Ann Bermingham has pointed out, Art exhibitions had enjoyed a particular popularity in 1822 - that year saw what have been described as among the first "blockbuster" exhibitions of art in Britain. John Martin's Belshezzar's Feast and David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners both drew crowds of spectators when they were exhibited in London earlier in the year. Ann Bermingham, "Urbanity and the Spectacle of Art," in Chandler and Gilmartin, ed., Romantic Metropolis, 166.
38. See also David Solkin's important Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).
39. Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997).
40. Such spaces included the London galleries of men like the Marquises of Stafford and Westminster, who were praised, not scorned, in the popular press for their opulence. Those collections were opened only to a carefully selected and fashionable urban elite, and used the appearance and rhetoric of privacy and domesticity to distance themselves from the taint of commerce. See Anne Nellis, '"The Shrine of Art': Rhetorics of Collection and Display in Early-Nineteenth-Century London" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2003).
41. In these essays, later collected in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (1824), Hazlitt rhapsodically described the pleasures of looking at pictures in private houses. Hazlitt's essay on Fonthill, however, which appeared in the November 1822 issue of the London Magazine, was not included in the Sketches, and differed markedly from them in tone.
42. William Hazlitt, "Fonthill Abbey," in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), 18:173. (Hereafter referenced as "FA.")
43. On the use of these and other tropes in Hazlitt's writing on art, see Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 167-78.
44. For an overview of accepted English taste in this period, see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976).
45. For an excellent discussion of Hazlitt's critiques of the Royal Academy exhibition, see Andrew Hemingway, "Art Exhibitions as Leisure-Class Rituals in Early Nineteenth-Century London," in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).
46. Hemingway, Landscape Imagery, 48-49.
47. These schools of thought are usefully outlined in Appleby, "Consumption," 162-73. Such language was used by critics and in the burgeoning discipline of political economy to refer to commodities that were considered "luxuries" (as distinct from "necessities"). Adam Smith, for example, used words like "trinkets" and "baubles," which appear frequently in the Fonthill criticism, to register this distinction. See Neil de Marchi, "Adam Smith's accommodation of 'altogether endless' desires," in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650-1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 24;
48. and Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, "The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates," in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, ed. Berg and Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21.
49. The "Talisman of Oromanes" is a reference to a story in Tales of the Genii, the purported translation of the Arabian Nights written by the Rev. James Ridley and published under the pseudonym Sir Charles Morell in 1764. The quote is from "DFA," 369.
50. "The Fonthill Effects," The Times, 2 October 1822, 2a.
51. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 68.
52. On the abolition movement, see J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995).
53. Casid argues this in connection with Beckford specifically and with English and French landscape gardening in general in Solving Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), see esp. 57-74.
54. Payne, Toil and Plenty, 12-13.
55. "It is impossible not to be astonished in seeing these riches displayed. Here the costly shawls from the East Indies, there brocades and silk-tissues from China, now a world of gold and silver plate, then pearls and gems shedding their dazzling lustre, home manufactures of the most exquisite taste, an ocean of rings, watches, chains, bracelets, and aigrettes, ready-dresses, ribbons, lace, bonnets, and fruit from all the zones of the habitable world - attract, tempt, and distract, astonish your eyes. You are carried along by the current; otherwise you would stop at every pace, to gaze, to admire and to covet." Letters from Albion to a friend on the Continent, written in the years 1810, 1817, 1812, and 1813, v. 1 (London, 1814), 79-80.
56. "Provincial Occurrences: Wiltshire," New Monthly Magazine n.s. 6 (1 October 1822): 479-80.
57. John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey (London: John Rutter, 1823).
58. "The Fonthill Mania," Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (1823): 603-4.
59. On Ackermann see Simon Jervis, "Rudolph Ackermann," in London: World City, 1800-1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 97-109,
60. and Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 129-45.
61. Most of these appeared following the publication of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb's The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982).
62. There are several studies that deal with the early to mid-eighteenth century; see, for example, Erin Mackie, Market aÌ la mode
63. and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997).
64. On the early nineteenth-century, see Alison Adburgham, Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979),
65. and Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003).
66. On the connections between shopping and respectability, see Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
67. Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England, in Howe, Works, 10:7.
68. John Brewer, "The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious.' Attitudes towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660-1800," in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 352.
69. See also Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), 87-98.
70. "Fonthill Abbey," in Howe, Works, 18:173.
71. Notions of comfort and domesticity were increasingly linked to private morality and public authority in this period. This domesticity was initially linked primarily with the middle classes, but was certainly not limited to this group. The classic work on this subject is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1987).
72. For an analysis of how notions about how private morality became central to public discourse in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, see Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).
73. [Richard Colt Hoare], "Fonthill Abbey. On its close." Gentleman's Magazine 92 (October 1822): 291-92.
74. Wiltshire Gazette (19 September 1822).
75. See The Fonthill Abbey Sales of 100 Years Ago. [Clippings from the Wiltshire Gazette, Aug. 23, 1923-Dec. 6, 1923.] Huntington Library, Reference DA690. F6.W5.
76. "A Day at Fonthill Abbey," New Monthly Magazine (October 1822), 372.
77. For an analysis of the Gothic novel in this context see Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
78. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 72-73.
79. The question of precisely how the figure of the homosexual, who was not identified as such until the end of the nineteenth century, may have been understood by late eighteenth-century society has been the subject of lively and ongoing debate. See Michael McKeon, "Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760, " Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (Spring 1995), 311;
80. George Haggarty, in Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 10;
81. Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1760" in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman et. al. (London: Penguin, 1991);
82. and Carter, "Masculinity and Eighteenth-Century Social Documentary," 430. Andrew Elfenbein has suggested that in the late eighteenth century the cultural type of the homosexual was already becoming associated with particular approaches to collecting, arguing that Beckford's collecting practice was a knowingly transgressive one.
83. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 39-62.
84. See also Whitney Davis, "Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920," Art History 24 (April 2001): 247-77.
85. Carole Fabricant, "The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property," in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 255.
86. Brian Fothergill, Beck ford of Fonthill (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 314.
87. John Britton, Graphical and Literary Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey, (London, 1823), 23.
88. On the cultivation of women's taste in the pages of the Repository of Arts, see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 140.
89. "Fonthill Abbey," Repository of Arts (August 1823): 103-105.
90. There was at least one other view like this, a view showing alterations made to Fonthill's Fountain Court to use it as a refectory in the summer of 1823. This print was apparently made to be bound into copies of John Rutter's Delineations (1823).