"The hoarding sense"

Abstract

This project analyzes the roles hoarding plays in nineteenth-century culture and fiction. Many scholars of the nineteenth century are interested in the roles things and material culture play in the literature of the period, but there are no contemporary studies of hoarding before the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century hoarder appears at the intersection of two other popular nineteenth-century cultural and literary phenomena: the miser and the collector. But the hoarder does not fit fully into either category, and so the lines between miser, hoarder, and collector blur in nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction. I demonstrate the nineteenth century’s interest in hoarding by uncovering a variety of historical anecdotes in the form of biographies and periodical accounts that reveal how the period interpreted hoarding. I then examine the role of hoarding in the works of three canonical authors, Jane Austen, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. I consider how each author uses hoarding as a metaphor for other concerns, such as the building of domestic spaces, mourning, and the changing relationships between people and things. Ultimately, I suggest the presence of hoarding in nineteenth-century literature and culture burdens the present-day scholar and curator with the anxiety deciding how to interpret the historical importance of physical objects that possess little to no historical or monetary value.