Janine Barchas

Curating Will & Jane

“Curating Will & Jane” provides an overview of the exhibition, Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity, opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in August 2016. Shakespeare and Austen became literary celebrities roughly 200 years after their deaths, and the Will & Jane exhibition tells the story of that process through the display of many and various objects—from porcelain figurines and portraits, to advertisements and bobbleheads—that are part of the marketing and cultural dissemination of literary fame. The authors of the article also reflect, as literary-scholarsturned-curators, on what they learned about how material culture produces and records celebrity when the objects of study range beyond standard printed artifacts.

Hell-Fire Jane: Austen and the Dashwoods of West Wycombe

Modern readers of Jane Austen have been reluctant to acknowledge that Sense and Sensibility (1811) rewards, and perhaps even demands, detailed knowledge of one of Englands most notorious families in Austens time, namely the Dashwoods of West Wycombe Park. The best-known member of the Dashwood clan was Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), second Baronet and Lord Le Despencer, leader of a group of high-profile libertines whose decades of bacchanals earned it the label Hell-Fire Club. At West Wycombe, Sir Francis also designed an emblematic garden, infamous for the ribald features that mimicked the female form. Although Francis Dashwood died in 1781, throughout Austens lifetime stories about his garden and Hell-Fire shenanigans proliferated in print, while his heirs (the next two baronets were both named John Dashwood) perpetuated his rakish legacy with high-profile domestic conflicts. In short, a lively print market for gossip at the turn of the century insured that the infamous name of Dashwood remained synonymous with diabolism, sexual lewdness, and the dubious privileges of wealth. This essay outlines some of the interpretive implications of this ignored historical context for the Dashwood-centered story of Sense and Sensibility.

Reporting on What Jane Saw 2.0: Female Celebrity and Sensationalism in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery

This essay reports on ongoing efforts to build an accurate digital model of John Boydell’s popular Shakespeare Gallery precisely as it looked in August 1796—when a 20-year-old Jane Austen visited London’s sites, staying within a ten-minute walk from the gallery. The essay argues for the substantial difference between studying Boydell’s pictures in a paper volume (whether as lists, illustrations in books, or engraved folio plates) and viewing them as an exhibition of paintings on walls, albeit virtual ones. For example, the digital reconstruction illuminated commissions from several female participants in Boydell’s male-dominated gallery, especially Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Anne Seymour Damer (1749-1828). In addition, the essay also recounts how the celebrity of model Emma Hart/Hamilton (1765-1815) safeguarded one Boydell painting from oblivion while The Shakespeare Gallery proved the site of a strange form of self-promotion practiced by actress Mary Wells (1762-1829). Our digital visualization of an historic exhibition in 1796 brought the controversial celebrity of a few women artists into focus. In sum, this essay shows DH methodology in action while sampling what might be gleaned when digital tools serve historical scholarship in the humanities.