The hummingbird cabinet

by Judith Pascoe

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the activity of collecting became democratised and popularised, allowing all kinds of people to become caught up in the collecting obsessions of the period: birds, books, Napoleonic relics, botanical specimens, Egyptiana, and fossils. She links the collecting craze during the period with the subsequent fetishization of romantic poets and their possessions, revealing the extent to which an ongoing fascination with material objects—with Keats's hair and Shelley's guitar, for example—helped to produce an enduring image of these poets as spiritual emissaries of a less materialistic age. Judith Pascoe maintains that romanticism as a literary movement played a crucial supporting role in varied attempts by collectors of this era to fashion identities for themselves through collecting. She makes the case that the romantic period stands out as a distinct moment in collecting history, a transition between the flourishing of the Renaissance w