Manuscript in the Writer's House Museum

Watson, Nicola J. (2025). Manuscript in the Writer's House Museum. In: Sommer, Tim ed. Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–149.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003432470-9

Abstract

What happens when a literary manuscript is displayed in a writer’s house museum? Does it change the way that a manuscript signifies, and indeed, change what it signifies? This chapter explores the cultural meanings that manuscript as a medium accrued from the late eighteenth century onwards, as it came to underpin a new idea of authorship, binding together ideas of origination, of process, of embodiment, and of intimacy between writer and reader. This new understanding of literary manuscript came to inform a later but analogous cultural formation, the writer’s house museum. The chapter then turns to consider the contemporary and evolving realization of these concepts of manuscript within the writer’s house museum today. Counterposing two instances, the display of the manuscript of John Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” in Keats House, Hampstead on the anniversary of its composition in 2019, and the display of a Shakespeare First Folio at New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon in 2023 to mark the 400th anniversary of its publication, the essay reflects upon how and to what ends author and reader, manuscript and book, construct one another within the museum.

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