Pamela Buck is Associate Professor of English at Sacred Heart University. She is a scholar of British Romantic literature whose work focuses particularly on gender, empire, and material culture. Recent publications include articles on Jane Austen and imperial trade (in LIT), recovering women’s travel writing (in European Romantic Review) and Anna Maria Falconbridge (in Women’s Writing). Her first book, Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs, which we discuss below, has just been published by University of Delaware Press.
1) How did you first become interested in Revolutionary souvenirs?
Objects of Liberty began as a graduate seminar paper on Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France in a course on the radical 1790s. I was struck by Williams’ collecting of small objects like tricolor ribbons, snuffboxes, and miniature models of the Bastille on her travels through Revolutionary Paris. She was essentially shopping for souvenirs, much as we do today. A souvenir is a small, relatively inexpensive object secured by a traveler as a memento of a journey and includes a wide variety of purchased or found objects, including keepsakes, relics, gifts, and physical fragments of a travel destination or experience. I noticed that it assumed an overtly political importance during the Revolutionary period. As I did further research, I discovered that other women writers participated in this trend, and I became interested in how they used the souvenir as a unique strategy to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate.
2) What were the most important affordances of souvenirs for British travellers in France during the Revolutionary period?
Souvenirs allowed women to encourage support for revolutionary principles because they presented political events in appealing ways. Designed to be eye-catching, their attractiveness, simplicity, novelty, or humor could inspire collection or purchase, while their three-dimensionality encouraged physical engagement with them. Although ephemeral in nature, they rendered tangible the intangible, capturing moments and transforming them into memories.
As small objects, souvenirs scaled down large events to make the politics of the Revolution accessible to a broader public. Their diminutive size allowed them to be carried in pockets, held in the hand, and easily transported across borders. Women circulated souvenirs to provide visual representations of the conflict in France to an audience in Britain. By arranging and displaying them in domestic and private spaces, women brought controversial conversations into the home and used them to narrate political events and ideas.
A good example of this is a snuffbox Williams purchased that contained a picture of the Abbé Maury, whom Revolutionaries in France despised for supporting the old regime. Fixed on a spring, the image of the Abbé would have jumped out when the box was opened. Her snuffbox not only employed the sentiment of humor to provoke viewers’ laughter but also satirized a prominent political figure to encourage support for the Revolution. Despite their seemingly trivial nature, souvenirs afforded women a powerful means of conveying political ideas.
3) How did women use souvenirs differently from their male contemporaries?
Collecting souvenirs was a standard practice of privileged Englishmen on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour that reflected their wealth and worldliness and increased their prestige at home. Female travelers who engaged in political tourism during the Revolutionary era used souvenirs to provide physical proof of eyewitness experiences and gain prestige in the form of authority. Souvenirs also gave women more opportunities for public involvement, allowing them to become political actors and advocate for citizenship. Although they were barred from voting or serving in Parliament, the fans, jewelry, and cockades they carried or wore publicized their political ideologies and allowed them to shape public opinion.
While men collected for power and control, women collected souvenirs to challenge dominant male narratives of empire and war. For instance, Charlotte Eaton redefined views of the Battle of Waterloo through souvenirs in A Narrative of a Residence in Belgium. While male tourists brought back body parts like teeth or skulls as war souvenirs that signified the conquest and plunder of empire, Eaton gathered tragedy souvenirs, such as packets of soldiers’ ashes, that served as objects of grief and mourning. Countering male collectors who presented the battle as a national victory, she conveyed the horror of war and balanced patriotism with the cost of conflict. In interpreting the male space of war through feminine concerns, she transformed the battlefield into a site of sympathy and commemoration.
4) How did you select the writers on whom your four central chapters and conclusion focus (Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley)?
I chose to examine works by women writers that follow the pivotal moments of the period, from the Revolution Debate of the 1790s to the rise of Napoleon’s empire and his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Williams, who employed sentimental souvenirs to create sympathy for liberal ideas, was significant for marking a new direction in women’s political involvement during the early Revolutionary period. In response to Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft used peep-show souvenirs in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution to explain the violent turn of events in France and counter political spectacle during the Reign of Terror.
During the Napoleonic era, Catherine and Martha Wilmot utilized souvenirs in their journals to oppose Napoleon’s expanding empire and its threat to liberty. While Catherine collected a cabinet of curiosities in Italy to subvert his imperial acquisition of European art for the Louvre Museum, her sister Martha encouraged a political alliance between Britain and Russia through her exchange of miniature portraits with Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. As British tourists sought material reminders of their victory after Waterloo, Eaton employed souvenirs like panoramic maps and military relics to redefine notions of patriotism and national identity.
Although most studies of the period end here, I briefly trace the reemergence of ideas of liberty in the European nationalist movements of the 1840s. In the conclusion, I examine how Mary Shelley collected folk hero figurines, like those of Andreas Hofer and Toussaint Louverture, to evoke the democratic spirit of the Revolution and advocate for liberal reform in Rambles in Germany and Italy. Her work reveals how souvenirs persisted as a mode of political intervention for women and renewed the cosmopolitan vision of earlier writers.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on several projects involving women writers and material culture in a global context. In an essay on Mary Ann Parker’s A Voyage Round the World, which documents the trade in animal products like feathers and skins from New South Wales, I demonstrate how Romantic interest in natural history and scientific collecting emerged with the rise of European colonialism. This essay is forthcoming in the volume Romantic Beasts, edited by Chris Clason and Michael Demson, from Bucknell University Press.
In another essay on archaeologist Amelia Edwards’ A Thousand Miles up the Nile, I argue that she criticizes the collecting of scarab beetle jewelry to contest British control of Egypt and Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East. The piece is currently slated for the volume Pin-Ups, edited by Audrey Murfin, Sibyl Rae Bucheli, and Victoria Pettersen Lantz. These projects have me thinking how much I would love to write a second book on women travel writers, fashion, and imperialism.
I also will be contributing an introductory essay to an exciting new volume of The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Carolyn Dever and Amy Kahrmann Huseby, that seeks to undiscipline Victorian studies by rethinking and reframing women writers of this period in a more global and inclusive way.