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Alan Kidd, John Plotz. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xvii, 268. $35.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 890, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.890
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There is a word missing from the title of this book that really ought to be there. The impression is conveyed by words and images (on the front jacket appear a rocking horse, a cricket ball, an antique book, and a silver teapot) that this is a study of Victorian “things” viewed through the intriguing concept of “portable property.” There is no reference to what is actually the central subject of the book: the Victorian novel. Perhaps this does not detract greatly from what turns out to be a stimulating if rather frustrating study, but it does lend weight to the already overburdened adage that one can't judge a book by its cover.
Victorian middle-class homes were packed with objects, and some had the atmosphere of small museums replete with the clutter of “collectomania.” As John Plotz remarks in his opening sentence: “the Victorians loved their things.” Moreover, in an era of unprecedented advances in means of communication and travel, the portability of certain objects could lend them value as agents of cultural transfer that they never possessed before. Victorian Englishmen and Englishwomen cavorted across large segments of the globe that commerce and imperialism had taught them to regard as their own. They carried with them a variety of “things” and in doing so these portable objects acquired a cultural meaning when used or displayed outside their original context.
