{"id":130,"date":"2018-11-15T17:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=130"},"modified":"2018-07-03T11:41:55","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:41:55","slug":"post-6-at-abbotsford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=130","title":{"rendered":"At Abbotsford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A writer\u2019s birthplace like that of Shakespeare\u2019s is of course in some sense a \u2018writer\u2019s house\u2019. But it is almost never the house in which the writing has actually been done, the workshop of genius. One house that does speak eloquently of the writer\u2019s labour, however, is Abbotsford, the most famous of the many homes of Sir Walter Scott, poet, novelist, and a nineteenth century national treasure.<\/p>\n

Recently Abbotsford has been carefully and expensively redisplayed, to excellent effect. I went up in 2017 and admired the way that the curators had chosen to display all sorts of objects in an entry exhibition, while then showing the house as it might have been when Scott was in his element entertaining his many visitors. But when I visited Abbotsford in 2003, before the present redisplay, the house retained for the most part its Victorian aesthetic; laid out explicitly as a shrine to Scott, it was still studded with rather dismaying relics which he himself would have mightily relished \u2013 a lock of hair, a walking-stick, the sofa on which he died, and worst of all, embalmed in a glass case, \u2018the last suit of clothes Sir Walter Scott wore\u2019, complete with shoes, gloves, hat, chain, stick, and gaiters. Indeed the whole house was displayed pretty much as it had been ever since the death of Sir Walter Scott. It spoke of the novelist dead in the service of the national literature. The study was animated by representation and relic of Scott: the first in the shape of a bronze cast of Scott\u2019s head taken after his death placed in the small turret room which he called his \u2018Speak-a-bit\u2019, the second a lock of Scott\u2019s hair. Personal items were used to give physical scale and to create a coming of age narrative: the beginning of the narrative was indicated by Scott\u2019s baby cutlery, the end by his spectacles lying on the desk.<\/p>\n

Although relics of authors had been treasured before the 1830s, they had not been displayed as part of a domestic montage before, nor indeed in such numbers. Arranged this way, they were no longer individual relics, near-souvenirs, but made up a shadowy outline of the author\u2019s domestic and physical life. At the core of the house, in the study, \u00a0sat the pieces of furniture that dramatise the writer\u2019s labour: the \u2018Sheraton writing table and chair used by Sir Walter Scott when writing his novels, in 39 Castle Street, Edinburgh\u2019 and the very desk and chair in which Scott and fellow authors Thomas Dibdin and Nathaniel Hawthorne sat. Sir Walter Scott\u2019s writing desk, complete with cheque book, spectacles, paper knife, and seals was captioned as the desk \u2018at which the later Novels were written and where he laboured to pay off the Debt, incurred 1826, through the firms of Messrs Constable and Ballantyne\u2019. This references the Victorian notion of Scott as both a national writer of a genius to rival that of Shakespeare but also as a moral exemplar, a man who worked himself to death to pay off his creditors after the collapse of the publishing house with which he was associated. Abbotsford is of great importance in the development of the writer\u2019s house as a tourist destination \u00a0because it was the first house consciously designed by a writer as a realisation of his literary aesthetic \u00a0and to display the income and status achieved from authorship; it was, moreover, the first house shown primarily as the site of the writer\u2019s work It acted as a fitting frame for the identity and literary achievements of both the \u2018Minstrel of the North\u2019 and the \u2018Author of Waverley\u2019, and \u00a0\u00a0was visited by admirers in Scott\u2019s lifetime as well as after. As such, it became the model for many other nineteenth-century writers\u2019 own houses, and for the modes in which many of them would eventually become museums. The model of tourism that is associated with Abbotsford is the visit to the living adult author armed with a letter of introduction, with the delightful prospect of having them as host, companion and tour guide of their home and \u2018haunts\u2019. The act of viewing the house is accordingly an imaginative effort to bring the absent author once more to life. This is still very much the case today; if you take the audio-tour, you will find Scott\u2019s voice in your ear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A writer\u2019s birthplace like that of Shakespeare\u2019s is of course in some sense a \u2018writer\u2019s house\u2019. But it is almost never the house in which the writing has actually been done, the workshop of genius. One house that does speak … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,33,34,35,32,31,30,29,66,4,7,36,65],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abbotsford","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-love-of-literature","tag-nathaniel-hawthorne","tag-nicola-watson","tag-sir-walter-scott","tag-the-literary-tourist-readers-and-places-in-romantic-and-victorian-britain","tag-thomas-dibdin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}