Wordsworth’s Cabinets and Virtuosi: Unstable Forms of Knowledge in The Prelude

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This paper examines examples of the language of the Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer (the collector’s cabinet of art, antiquities, ‘curiosities’, and ‘wonders’), and the character of the ‘virtuoso’ (the collector, antiquary, connoisseur, and natural philosopher) and its parodies in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem, The Prelude (completed 1805). The paper uses a theoretical methodology based on ideas in Foucault’s The Order of Things and Horst Bredekamp’s The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. It further draws on the historical context of tensions between scholasticism and naturalism in the work of writers including Basil Willey, Walter Houghton, and John Brewer. Close readings of four passages in The Prelude related to cabinets and virtuosi then invite discussion of the text’s complex positions on nature, classification, and mechanistic philosophy in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemologies. The paper argues that the images of the ‘cabinet’ and the ‘virtuoso’ are highly unstable signifiers in their historical contexts. These images allow the poem to simultaneously critique opposing forces in intellectual history. On the one hand, these images critique the naturalism of the ‘New Science’ of the Enlightenment—the legacies of Bacon, Kepler, Descartes, and Locke— while making assumptions about its mechanistic and utilitarian goals, and its devotion to classifying and categorising objects and phenomena. On the other hand, these images also carry an implicit critique of the supernatural scholasticism of the classical and pre-Early-Modern periods, which manifests in the late eighteenth century as retrograde antiquarianism, scientific dilettantism, and the character of the myopic antiquary or collector. Here the text makes contrasting assumptions about the disorder, anti-historicism, and superstitions of the Kunstkammer as the prototypical museum. While the Prelude texts generally position Wordsworth against mechanistic natural philosophy, in favour of a more superstitious scholasticism, they simultaneously display a methodical, analytical Enlightenment mind at work. Through readings of passages of cabinets and virtuosos in Books 2, 3, and 5 of The Prelude, the paper concludes that Wordsworth’s occasional use of these images in his work—what he might term objects removed from context in order to be classified, arranged, and positioned ‘In disconnection, dead and spiritless’—significantly bears on a central concern in his poetry: the relationship between history, nature, and the creative imagination.

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