Collecting the Nineteenth Century: The 'Ideal' Library of John and Joséphine Bowes (original) (raw)

Abstract

In 1852, Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevalier, an actress at the Théâtre des variétés, married the theatre’s English owner, John Bowes, a successful businessman and son of the tenth Earl of Strathmore. The bedrock of their relationship was their shared interest in the arts, an interest that developed into major collecting habits, and they would go on to amass a collection that would require a museum to house it. The predominantly French and Spanish fine and decorative arts that form the collection held at the Bowes Museum in County Durham is world-famous, but the Bowes did not just collect art objects. The Museum also houses their library, running to some 1700 volumes of French literature, which has gone untouched since John’s death in 1885. These texts constitute at once both the Bowes’ personal library, as well as books likely intended as museum objects, either because of their content (in keeping with the museum’s pedagogical ethos) or because of a volume’s particular significance (inscriptions, bindings, etc.). Indeed, a number of volumes contain personal inscriptions from the author to John and/or Joséphine. With these two aspects in mind, this paper proposes to explore the contents of this library as a kind of ‘ideal’ nineteenth-century French library, reflecting on three main elements: the gendered nature of canonization (there are a great many female writers in this collection); the allure of popular fiction; and finally the problematic figure of the female collector, for Joséphine Bowes herself has long been forgotten.

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