Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The field of tourism theory has always relied on the imagery of the theatre as a vehicle. Dean MacCannell’s germinal 1973 paper on tourism foregrounds this metaphor in its title: “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings” (American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3 [1973]: 589–603). MacCannell based his theory of tourism on Erving Goffman’s influential work on our “back”- and “front”-facing personae in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to help him explain what is happening when tourists travel. In short: tourists often get presented with “front”-stage performances of local authenticity, such as a gondolier singing opera while paddling Venetian canals, but they are seeking “back”-stage access to authenticate their experiences. If you note the ubiquity of words such as “hidden” or “local” in touristic literature, you will see the premium placed on supposedly “back”-stage sites. Literary scholars have made use of tourism theory from time to time, but Laura Engel’s Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 renews this theoretical framework for archival work, using its terms to propose a method of regarding one’s own research practices. This theoretical reframing helpfully examines the dynamics of voyeurism, what to make of physical contact with objects in the archive, and notions of authenticity that arise in processes of working with material objects from the past.

This articulation of tourism theory as a means for regarding archival work is not the only theoretical breakthrough of Engel’s highly readable monograph. Overtop this first framework—one rooted in the social science of Goffman and MacCannell—Engel draws upon studies in performance and celebrity, more familiar than tourism theory to literary scholars of the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, to look at the material objects under review in each chapter. Engel is explicit about the stakes of this cross-pollination, explaining that “tourism is celebrating the archives and the archives are filled with tourists. While there are many ways to distinguish between the two, linking them may allow us to imagine ourselves as dynamic embodied participants in the translation between the past and the present” (19). In retraining the eye backwards on the archival scholar as well as forward on the performance of identities in eighteenth-century art, literature, and theatre, Engel plays a deft trick—one that pays off.

To those already familiar with Engel’s two important books on eighteenth-century performance and gender, her explicit and recurring application of tourism theory throughout this latest volume only adds [End Page 273] to one’s appreciation of her deft analysis of materiality and performance. The objects of Engel’s inquiry, which she explains are “specifically tied to memory and the staging or representation/recreation of corporeal presence” (2), follow a chronological sequence. This sequence of chapters begins with an exploration of Elizabeth Inchbald’s pocket diaries. It con tinues with Thomas Lawrence’s portraits of and correspondence with Sarah Siddons and her daughters Sally and Maria, and then offers a chapter examining the Countess of Blessington’s estate sale through the lens of her Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822) (itself an important theoretical examination of tourism). The penultimate chapter assesses the significance of Isabella Beetham and her daughter Jane Read’s silhouettes and Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures. The book concludes with Fanny Kemble’s plantation journal and Amelia

M. Watson’s subsequent photographs of Kemble’s land. Working with the material objects that form the centre of this work, Engel is self-conscious of her role as the sorter and chronicler of materiality. She writes almost as a tour guide, leading readers deftly across the centuries and through diverse media. Most of the figures under scrutiny in this book were performers, artists, and celebrities, and Engel’s theoretical approach calls due attention to the feeling of self-consciousness...