British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930

By Angela Blumberg

British literature and archaeology, 1880-1930 reveals how British writers and artists across the long turn of the twentieth century engaged with archaeological discourse—its artefacts, landscapes, bodies, and methods—uncovering the materials of the past to envision radical possibilities for the present and future. This project traces how archaeology shaped major late-Victorian and modern discussions: informing debates over shifting gender roles; facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists historicise the traumas of the First World War. Ultimately unearthing archaeology at the centre of these major discourses, this book simultaneously positions literary and artistic engagements with the archaeological imagination as forms of archaeological knowledge in themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526161468

Book preview

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930

Series editors: Anna Barton, Andrew Smith

Editorial board: David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Philip Holden, Jerome McGann, Joanne Wilkes, Julia M. Wright

Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century seeks to make a significant intervention into the critical narratives that dominate conventional and established understandings of nineteenth-century literature. Informed by the latest developments in criticism and theory the series provides a focus for how texts from the long nineteenth century, and more recent adaptations of them, revitalise our knowledge of and engagement with the period. It explores the radical possibilities offered by new methods, unexplored contexts, and neglected authors and texts to re-map the literary-cultural landscape of the period and rigorously re-imagine its geographical and historical parameters. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and scholarly sourcebooks.

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Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds)

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The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook Jonathon Shears (ed.)

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Counterfactual Romanticism Damian Walford Davies (ed.)

The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context Anne Woolley

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930

Angie Blumberg

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Angie Blumberg 2022

The right of Angie Blumberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6147 5 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: ‘Go Seek’, illustration from Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts. Courtesy of The University of Virginia Library (PR5820 .S6 1894).

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: ‘Our real life in tombs’

1Queer archaeologies

2Archaeology and Decadent prose

3Archaeology and authenticity

4Our real life in tombs: Great War archaeology

CODA: Archaeology from a distance

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.1Panel Portrait of a Man—from the Fayum in Egypt, late first century CE. (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.)

1.2Frontispiece, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

1.3Illustration, ‘Go Seek’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

1.4Illustration, ‘And Nilus’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

1.5Illustration draft, ‘Rose up the painted swathed dead’, for Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, by Charles Ricketts, second series, 1923.

3.1‘Bogus Antiquities: The Manufacture of Sham Works of Art’, The Sketch, Wednesday 20 September, 1905, p. 376.

4.1Paul Nash, The Pyramids in the Sea, 1912. (Tate, London, UK.)

4.2Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 1146).)

4.3Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 2242).)

4.4Paul Nash, ‘Funeral Pyre’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St. Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.)

4.5Paul Nash, ‘Tokens’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.)

4.6Paul Nash, ‘Ghosts’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.)

Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to teachers of many varieties for their role in supporting this book. Thank you to Ellen Crowell for guiding me through its earliest stages, both sharing and inspiring enthusiasm for the work and its possibilities. I am grateful to Phyllis Weliver for her longstanding mentorship and support, and to Anne Stiles for her feedback on early portions of the work. I also want to acknowledge a 2016 Mellon summer seminar—Wartime: The Great War and the Historiography of Modernism—at Washington University in St Louis, led by Vincent Sherry, whose conversation, guidance, and scholarship have been immensely valuable in my study of the Great War. Thank you to Heather Bozant Witcher for her friendship and advice over the last several years, and for modelling true collegiality. Thank you also to Geoff Brewer for forgery conversations over cocktails, and for recommending some of the material addressed in my third chapter. Finally, I must thank my first teachers—my parents—for their steadfast support and encouragement, and Jayce, for believing in me and indulging my passion for the research.

There are also several institutions and organisations that have aided this book in key ways. I am grateful to the English Department, Saint Louis University for supporting the work in its earliest stages, and to the English Department at Auburn University for supporting me through the rest of its development. Finally, thank you to the DePaul Humanities Center and the lovely group of interdisciplinary researchers with whom in 2018 I was able to explore the theme of the Fake.Fake.

Introduction: ‘Our real life in tombs’

In late November 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter made a small hole in the corner of a subterranean doorway beneath the sands of Egypt. After performing the necessary tests, ‘as a precaution against possible foul gases’, he widened the hole slightly, ‘inserted the candle and peered in’.¹ In The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen (1923), Carter (along with his collaborator Arthur Mace) narrates what follows, as his patron Lord Carnarvon, his colleague Arthur Callender, and Carnarvon’s daughter Evelyn wait beside him:

At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things’.²

Carter’s depiction of this moment—in which he witnesses for the first time the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, glimmering in the unsteady candlelight—has become one of the most famous narratives of archaeological encounter. The artefacts concealed in the tomb ‘[emerge] slowly from the mist’, as if arising into the present from the shadowy past itself. Carter imagines that those who wait beside him experience ‘an eternity’ in this moment, as if he and they suddenly occupy different temporalities—Carter with a view of, and an arm in, the ancient past, and the others planted in the present, anxiously hoping to hear what he sees. The shock to the senses and to temporality embeds itself in the form of the text, through the em dash which divides Carter’s experience from that of those who wait. ‘[S]‌truck dumb with amazement’, Carter’s feeble attempt to describe the sight before him is, in the end, perfect. He witnesses ‘wonderful things’.

What kind of wonder is this? And what is so wonderful about ancient things? Excavating British literary culture across the long fin de siècle to uncover the transformative impacts of archaeological discourse, this book unearths a prehistory and an aesthetic context for Carter’s powerful archaeological narrative. The passage above highlights several of the central qualities of archaeological experience as represented at the fin de siècle: it is both aesthetic and intellectual, both temporally and emotionally destabilising, both frightening and alluring, and transformative to the styles and media in which it is represented. Archaeological encounters are also inherently transgressive—violating traditional borders of space, time, culture, and personhood. In piercing a hole in the doorway Carter both ruins the doorway and also breaches the spatio-temporal border between his own and Tutankhamen’s world. Immediately following the passage above, Carter explains, ‘Then widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch.’³ Carter’s narration introduces violence to the silent, hidden spaces of the past, an electric torch suddenly replacing his reverential reflection. The suggestion of defilement in the encounter, in which Carter penetrates the space with his arm and expands it before inserting the torch, points also to the themes of imperial, technological, and sexual violation that pervade British archaeological narratives at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the famous declaration of ‘wonderful things’, Carter meditates on the ‘feeling of awe—embarrassment almost’ that an excavator must experience in such a moment, ‘when they break into a chamber closed and sealed by pious hands so many centuries ago’.⁴ A sense of personal violation but also transhistorical communion diffuses his imagination: ‘The very air you breathe, unchanged throughout the centuries you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest. Time is annihilated by little intimate details such as these, and you feel an intruder.’⁵ Carter reflects on the intimacy of the moment, and the utter ‘annihilat[ion]’ of time between his own modern experience and the moment the ‘pious hands’ of the past entombed their king. Suddenly ‘you’ are part of this intrusion, breathing the stale air along with the archaeologist, embarrassed and also excited by the intimacy of the moment. The archaeological encounter transforms time and modern subjectivity in shocking ways that are in turn transformative to the prose style of Carter’s narrative.

This book examines these various qualities of archaeological encounter as represented primarily in literature, but also in visual art. The excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb, after all, uncovered what is perhaps one of the most widely recognised aesthetic objects of archaeological discovery—the gilded death mask of the young pharaoh. Exploring a range of literary and visual artefacts, this book reveals how writers and artists engaged with the materials of the past as a central mode of conceptualizing modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the revised and expanded 1921 version of Oscar Wilde’s 1889 novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., the unnamed narrator recalls how Shakespeare’s sonnets first affected him so intimately. ‘A book of sonnets’, he claims, ‘published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul’s romance.’⁶ This meditation glides immediately into his memory of opening an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus: ‘I remembered how once in Egypt I had been present at the opening of a frescoed coffin that had been found in one of the basalt tombs at Thebes. Inside there was the body of a young girl swathed in tight bands of linen, and with a gilt mask over the face.’ He recalls that the mummy held ‘a scroll of yellow papyrus covered with strange characters’ and wishes that he would have had the scroll read to him. ‘It might have told me something more about the soul that hid within me, and had its mysteries of passion of which I was kept in ignorance. Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for our real life, and in art for the legend of our days?’⁷ Wilde’s passage, like those in many of the texts I examine, explores the extent to which the material artefacts and bodies of the past are capable of facilitating personal, even spiritual, revelations for present peoples; they contain the secrets of our souls that we alone cannot access. Wilde’s narrator suggests that we know very little about ourselves, and poses a provocative question about the formation, understanding, and even the discovery of his own modern subjectivity—a question for which he finds possible solutions in the fantasy of an intimate connection between the present and the ancient past. This unnamed narrator’s desire to understand the ‘strange characters’ in an ancient text to discover his own hidden soul suggests how, for writers and artists at the fin de siècle, archaeology offered new and exciting ways of knowing. For the writers and artists in this study, archaeological encounters, reading practices, and imagery offer ways of knowing the self, the world, and time.

Other archaeologies

The chapters in this book offer various archaeological epistemologies at the long fin de siècle. Thus, what follows is not a catalogue of literary references to mummies, Greek statuary, or unearthed cities like Pompeii. Rather, I trace how writers turned to the archaeological imagination to transform central discourses and debates at the turn of the twentieth century: facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; shaping aesthetic experimentation and Decadent prose styles; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists navigate and historicise the traumas of the First World War.

As this list of discourses suggests, this book is not devoted to simple nostalgia. I am not as interested in writers and artists who longed to validate traditional histories or cultural hierarchies, though of course archaeological discourse was employed for those ends as well. This book is more interested in archaeology as a transgressive practice, in recognising how writers and artists unearthed the silenced, unsanctioned, and unofficial histories from beneath the dust and mud to imagine radical possibilities for their present and future. Early in the twentieth century, proponents of Futurism lashed out against nostalgia for the past and archaeology as one of its attendant disciplines. Marinetti’s 1909 ‘Manifeste du Futurisme’, the founding document of the movement, derides ‘the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and antiques dealers’.⁸ Boccioni and his fellow Futurist painters likewise despised how Italy was viewed by other countries as ‘a land of the dead, an immense Pompeii’, proclaiming: ‘[D]‌own with mercenary restorers of antiquated incrustations! Down with archaeologists afflicted by chronic necrophilia!’⁹ These condemnations showcase the centrality of archaeological discourse in conceptions of modernity at the time, and highlight how fraught the discussions were. In their introductory essay to a 2004 special issue of Modernism/modernity, entitled ‘Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity’, Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, and Matthew Tiews address this antagonism, explaining how Futurists and advocates of the avant-garde targeted nineteenth-century archaeology (both amateur, connoisseurship archaeology and the newly emerging scientific archaeology of academics) as a ‘monolithic antiquarianism whose deeper logic is declared insidious because it locates the past at the very core of a conservative, continuity-based vision of the future’.¹⁰ And yet, as Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews point out, ‘the abolition of archaeology has nested within it a positive counterproposal’. They continue: ‘It stands as the precondition for an other (and even othering) archaeology loosely affiliated both with Freud’s tracking of subterranean psychic and somatic intensities, and with an ongoing modern preoccupation […] with tapping into prehistoric instinctualisms, violence, savagery, sacrifice, and sacrality.’ This ‘other archaeology … cherishes the duplicity of archaeological objects: their moments of decontextualization and recontextualization. In being dug out and ripped from its matrix, the old object holds the potential of producing the effect of the new, by virtue of its very remoteness and alterity, its singularity.’¹¹ This book explores how a range of writers created these ‘other’ archaeologies through their texts. Showcasing how writers and artists revelled in ‘the duplicity of archaeological objects’, I trace how writers of various genres decontextualised and recontextualised archaeological objects and even landscapes to transform the discourses of modernity. The writers in this study seize upon the radical potentials in archaeological materials, as well as what Virginia Zimmerman calls the ‘powerful epistemological trope’ of archaeological excavation.¹² As Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews note, archaeological discourse continued in the twentieth century to be associated with Freud’s analogy between psychoanalysis and archaeological excavation, first introduced in his 1896 lecture ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’. Recent scholarship led by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks has unearthed literary explorations of physical, temporal, and psychological depth even before the 1890s, revealing the extent to which geology, archaeology, and literature informed each other across the long fin de siècle.¹³

Though this book focuses on archaeological discourse as a mode for challenging tradition and reimagining silenced voices, it also fully recognises the exploitative and cruel systems through which Western archaeologists and governments excavated and seized artefacts. Each chapter shows an awareness of what Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi call archaeology’s ‘intensely colonialist legacy’, acknowledging how systems of imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of cultural and economic oppression remain deeply implicated in the archaeological project.¹⁴ In their Foreword for the Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, Lydon and Rizvi make explicit the obvious, that ‘[archaeology’s] practitioners (both amateur and professional) have appropriated, possessed, and controlled someone else’s cultural heritage, often in the name of colonialism’.¹⁵ Similarly, in his introduction to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, Matthew Liebmann acknowledges archaeology’s ‘role in the historical production and deconstruction of colonialist discourses’: ‘From the earliest days of the discipline, archaeology has played a part in creating and controlling the representation of the past in colonized societies.’¹⁶ Despite, or perhaps because of, archaeology’s deep implication with systems of colonialism—what Liebmann calls the ‘attendant colonialist, neocolonialist, and imperialist baggage’ of archaeological practice—the discipline has only recently begun to engage honestly with postcolonial theory.¹⁷

However, these recent engagements, while working to decolonise the profession, also suggest a more ethical future for archaeological study, as well as promising new ways of re-reading established archaeological knowledge. Lydon and Rizvi argue that archaeology’s historically crucial role in colonialism positions it as possibly vital for ‘re-visioning the relations of production of knowledge about the past’.¹⁸ One of my key claims is that writers across the turn of the twentieth century turn to archaeology to unearth and amplify silenced voices. This claim is subject to Gayatri Spivak’s famous concern that in assigning voices to the subaltern we remain within, and likely perpetuate ‘the circuit of colonial production’.¹⁹ The writers in this book are generally not self-proclaimed archaeologists or historians at all, and thus rarely attempt to assign voices to bygone peoples with an air of historical authority. Instead, they revel in the inherent subjectiveness of archaeological encounter rather than claiming any real objectivity. Some even view such self-proclaimed empiricism as sordid. For example, in ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1891), Wilde lauds the ‘attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world’, claiming, ‘Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.’²⁰ Wilde appeals to the prerogative of the artist to breathe beauty into ‘old and outworn’ forms, rather than attempt to recreate them as they were. Writers in this book usually appropriate artefacts or landscapes for the sake of personal and aesthetic experimentation, and prefer their appropriations to remain imaginative rather than authoritative. However, this study acknowledges that even fictions are not excused from othering processes like Orientalism, and faces such essentialist representations head-on. Meanwhile, I also explore how writers engage with archaeology to imagine identities that dissolve national, cultural, or temporal bounds. In my readings of the ‘other’ archaeologies here, I draw from Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews’s description of readers and writers who ‘[cherish] the duplicity of archaeological objects’ that have been de- and re-contextualised, and ‘by virtue of [their] very remoteness and alterity, [their] singularity that allows for radical reconsiderations of self and other’, allow for new ongoing meaning making in the past and present.²¹

Additionally, this book often turns to literary representations of the museum, a space vitally linked with colonialism, nationalism, and, the practice of ‘dissociating Indigenous descendants from their heritage’.²² While according to Lydon and Rizvi, these spaces ‘have become Eurocentric regimes of memory, their fixity and permanence an antidote to modernity’s sense of instability and anxiety’, this book addresses the ways that museums also often fail to regulate the behaviours of their visitors and exhibits.²³ As Ruth Hoberman and Andreas Huyssen have shown, museumgoers and exhibits often misbehave. ‘[D]‌espite the pressures of rules and decorum, despite the self-regulation enforced by their visibility within a public space’, Hoberman claims, ‘actual [Edwardian] museumgoers experienced the museum in complex and unpredictable ways’.²⁴ Similarly, Huyssen argues, ‘No matter how much the museum, consciously or unconsciously, produced and affirms the symbolic order, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter-hegemonic memory.’²⁵ So, despite their apparent ‘fixity and permanence’, museum spaces and the clash of cultures and bodies within them can also create the very ‘instability and anxiety’ they seek to redress. Museum spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly sanctioned imperialism, national identity, and taste, but could also exacerbate anxieties about all three. This is demonstrated in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ (rev. 1870), in which the speaker observes ‘a wingèd beast from Nineveh’ being ‘hoist[ed]’ into the British Museum, and meditates on the bull god’s millennia of experience (lines 10, 9).²⁶ In the poem’s final stanzas, Rossetti’s speaker imagines a future Australian empire transporting the great Assyrian bull from a ruined England, ‘a relic now / Of London, not of Nineveh!’ (lines 179–180). The speaker concludes the poem with an incisive apostrophe, ‘Oh Nineveh, was this thy God,— / Thine also, mighty Nineveh?’ (lines 199–200). He suggests that in its violent imperial quest, England differed little from the primitive empire whose monuments it hauled across the globe. In its ethnocentrism and short-sighted pursuit of power, England risked the very same future it now imposed on ancient Assyria. Thus, while recognising how archaeology helped to construct colonial discourse, this book explores how British writers and artists unsettled sanctioned histories and temporalities and experimented with archaeological discourse to reshape conversations about not only imperialism, but sexuality, aesthetics, authenticity, and historiography.

‘Whether of Thebes or Nineveh’: British archaeology at the fin de siècle

In ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, Rossetti’s speaker meditates on the great Nineveh bull, exhibited a floor beneath the mummies of Egypt:

Why, of those mummies in the room

Above, there might indeed have come

One out of Egypt to thy home,

An alien. Nay were not some

Of these thine own ‘antiquity’? (lines 101–105)

The speaker fantasises about a historically vague period in which the figures recontextualised (or newly entombed) above visited the bull monument, before he corrects himself. Recalling that some of the mummies were ancient even to the Assyrians, the speaker wonders at the vastnesss of time and the relativism of historical distance.²⁷ He continues:

And now,— they and their gods and thou

All relics here together,— now

Whose profit? whether bull or cow,

Isis or Ibis, who or how,

Whether of Thebes or Nineveh? (lines 106–110)

While lamenting the bull god’s fall from grace, as he is placed alongside strange pieces from distant times and places, this crowded space is also a sort of dream world outside of time. To envision the great Assyrian bull just a floor below Egyptian mummies and beside Ibis figures is exciting, provocative, and—though only made possible by an imperial violence the poem critiques—one of the greatest ways archaeological excavation facilitated historical and personal fantasy.

To track archaeology’s role in shaping several key discourses of modernity, my study invokes a range of ancient and more temporally proximate civilisations that inspired the aesthetic and literary imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Instead of confining each chapter to the influence of particular civilisations or sites, what follows replicates the archaeological imagination as fin-de-siècle writers and artists more often experienced it in museum spaces and the popular press—as an eclectic mixture of ancient and not-so-distant civilisations from across the globe, tethered to each other by archaeological discourse and its evocative imagery, methods, and analogic relationship with excavations of the self. The chapters in this book thus exhibit writers and artists drawing from Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and domestic archaeology, often simultaneously, or engaging more broadly with the processes of archaeological interment, excavation, and interpretation. However, to facilitate the discussions that follow, I want to provide a brief introduction to the various ancient cultures and icons that impelled renegotiations of gendered, sexual, historical, and aesthetic politics at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with Egypt.

As many scholars have demonstrated, Egyptomania suffused Europe well before Carter discovered Tutankhamen. After Napoleon’s military expedition through Egypt in 1798–1801, Egyptian artefacts arrived in Europe in large numbers, where they were traded among collectors and also displayed in the British Museum. In 1821, the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, so named because of its Egyptian façade, featured the exhibition of a well-publicised archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who excavated at Abu Simbel, Giza, and Thebes.²⁸ Egyptology offered tactile connections to a non-classical history and aesthetic, and shaped prominent understandings of what Westerners termed the Orient. Susanne Duesterberg positions Egyptian archaeology against classical archaeology as ‘the less familiar strangeness’, claiming that as demonstrated by the reception of Egyptian archaeology, ‘the archaeological space functioned not only as a space for (re)creating and completing identity in Victorian and Edwardian society, but also as a counter-discourse for subverting, inverting, and (re)negotiating it’.²⁹ In 1882, England began its unofficial occupation of Egypt, often referred to as the ‘veiled protectorate’, an arrangement which opened up Egypt as a convenient exotic travel destination. This occupation lasted until 1914—a time span roughly corresponding to the scope of this book.³⁰ In the same year that the occupation began, Amelia Edwards set up the Egypt Exploration Fund, which sponsored archaeologists like William Flinders Petrie in their excavations. The rise in travel to Egypt also spurred Egyptian-esque archaeological romances like Haggard’s She (1887), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903).

Since the early 2000s, several scholars including Donald Malcolm Reid, Scott Trafton, David Gange, Roger Luckhurst, and Stephanie Moser, have produced rich readings of Egypt’s imperial, historical, religious, and aesthetic impacts on the Western world, and the West’s often disastrous impacts on Egypt.³¹ The rise of Ancient Egypt Reception Studies in the last decade features new perspectives on Egyptomania in art, architecture, fashion, and—as exemplified in work by Lynn Parramore, Maria Fleischhack, Eleanor Dobson, and Molly Youngkin, among others—literature of various genres.³² Much scholarly attention in recent years has addressed the ways in which the ‘Egyptian Question’—a phrase designating the complicated collection of political, financial, and ethical concerns surrounding Britain’s precarious occupation of Egypt after 1882—and the ‘Woman Question’—the group of topics associated with women’s shifting roles in society, including women’s suffrage and property rights—pervaded the press at similar times, placing gender politics and international politics side by side. Recent studies by Bradley Deane, Andrew Stauffer, Nolwenn Corriou, and Kate Hebblethwaite, among others, have invited us to read the discourses of archaeology, fiction, and the New Woman through each other, focusing mainly on the romances listed just above.³³ As I have argued elsewhere, ‘across a range of late-Victorian fiction, we see writers turning to the unearthed female mummy and ancient femininity to shape the discourse of the New Woman, envisioning new female subjectivities as emerging not as a product of the late nineteenth century but as old potential buried in ancient womanhood and merely released by the social, sexual, and political conditions of modernity’. Victorian artists across multiple media turned to archaeological materials to craft an aesthetic of subversive feminine power.³⁴ This book expands on this claim, revealing how writers across genres and modes turned to archaeological discourse to create subversive content of various kinds.

Beyond Egypt, one of the most prominent locales of archaeological inspiration for British writers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Greece. The dubious acquisition and installation of the Parthenon Sculptures (or the ‘Elgin marbles’) in the British Museum in 1816, along with the discovery of ancient Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1865, brought Greek antiquities to the forefront of British culture and aesthetic appreciation. For nearly twenty years, scholars have established how the literature, art, and culture of ancient Greece especially facilitated writers in their explorations of same-sex desire. While Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) does not deal directly with archaeology, this text firmly establishes the ways in which Victorian writers found in the ancient past ample opportunity to express radical sexual possibilities in the modern world. In addition to Dowling’s work, Stefano Evangelista’s British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009) and ‘Greek Textual Archaeology and Erotic Epigraphy in Simeon Solomon and Michael Field’ (2013) and Iain Ross’s Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013) address archaeology’s influence on fin-de-siècle British aestheticism and queer writers like Wilde, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], and Michael Field [Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley].³⁵ In fact, studies of nineteenth-century Hellenism are so numerous that they have to an extent overshadowed the significant influence of the ancient world more broadly across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My study aims to address this disparity in contemporary scholarship, restoring our understanding of the archaeological imagination as involving diverse ancient and not-so-ancient civilisations.

In addition to Greece and Egypt, British tourists also explored the Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, amazed by their catastrophic destruction and subsequent preservation. The devastation of the Vesuvian cities offered material for spectacle and drama. Along with the development of vulcanology and geology in the eighteenth century, the ongoing activity of Vesuvius inspired a spate of commercial volcanic spectacles in the UK and Europe—pyrotechnic re-enactments of volcanic eruptions. By 1792, Nicholas Daly explains, ‘[T]‌he volcano could register in a contained and ordered form both the fires of the French Revolution and the seismic changes wrought by industrialization.’³⁶ In the early nineteenth century, with the rise of Romanticism and increased archaeological activity in Pompeii, people grew increasingly interested in the more ancient eruption of Vesuvius, and, as Daly claims, focused attention ‘on the collision of the volcano with humanity, the moment of destruction and preservation’.³⁷ Thus the spectacles shifted, and writers adapted the personal dramas of Pompeii for poetry and opera. Zimmerman claims that while geographically distant, ancient Pompeii seemed to Victorians culturally proximate. What the Victorians enjoyed in Pompeii was ‘an almost gleeful assumption of coevalness’; ‘The Victorians did not assume they were the same as the Pompeians; rather, they assumed the Pompeians were the same as them.’³⁸ Pompeii was another site that offered Victorians opportunities to discuss sex more explicitly in the name of study. Contemporary anthropologist Barbara Voss explains that even the term ‘pornography (literally, whore-writing) was coined in 1850 by German archaeologist C.O Müller to classify a diverse set of objects and images found at Pompeii’.³⁹ Additionally, because of the unique and unintentional nature of the presentation of Pompeii, the private and quotidian survived alongside, or instead of, the public and political, allowing visitors to connect on a more personal level with the imagined inhabitants of