James Delbourgo, a professor of history at Rutgers University, New Jersey, says that his latest work is less a book about collecting than it is about the \u201ccultural idea\u201d of collecting. Does this need illuminating? Hasn\u2019t collecting long been seen as one of the more refined arts? A way for the educated and wealthy to show off their learning, taste, urbanity? Collectors escape the shackles of the present, throw lifelines to a disappearing past, replenish the future. Sure, says Delbourgo. But he is also interested in telling the story of how \u2013 through the ages and across continents, in the popular and sometimes political imagination \u2013 collectors have been seen\u00a0as introverts and perverts, as thieves and predators, as enemies of\u00a0the humanity and humanism they\u00a0espouse.<\/p>\n
The major religions have always been suspicious about collecting, which they associate not with piety so\u00a0much as idolatry. Why, their leaders thundered, would true believers worship objects rather than God? Artefacts \u2013 whether early coins featuring the image of Muhammad or\u00a0golden and gemstone-encrusted statues of the Buddha \u2013 were inherently flawed for, as theologian John Calvin declared, \u201cthe finite cannot contain the infinite\u201d. Yet images had the power to reach parts of illiterate societies that words alone never could. Churches invested in relics not only to attract donations and pilgrim-tourists, but to succour and solace parishioners in times of war or pestilence.<\/p>\n
Within living memory, idolatry was\u00a0one of the accusations levelled at\u00a0collectors during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They were targeted as decadents, bourgeois, in thrall to a discredited past. Their homes were raided, their antiquities destroyed. Such scorn for history would have appalled the Chinese thinkers and poets who, in the 17th century, developed the concept of pi<\/a>,\u00a0whose shifting meanings include hobby, craving, eccentricity, fetishism. But if it was an illness, it was one to be\u00a0celebrated. A true gentleman, wrote\u00a0Yuan Hongdao, \u201cworries only about having no obsessions\u201d. Collectors, it was believed, were brave,\u00a0deep, devotional.<\/p>\n Collecting is often assumed to be the preserve of men or man-boys. Notable exceptions include Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut and, in the 19th and 20th century, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Women collectors, in the very act of acquiring things, are sometimes said to be betraying their gentle, nurturing, \u201cfemale\u201d essence. Women collectors, in the very act of acquiring things, are sometimes said to be betraying their gentle, nurturing, \u201cfemale\u201d essence. In the 17th century, Queen Christina of Sweden sought to make Stockholm the \u201cAthens of the north\u201d, asked Descartes to set up a scientific academy in the city and was open to alchemy and mysticism. None of this counted for much \u2013 she wore, they all sniggered, men\u2019s clothes. She even refused to marry. Whether it\u2019s Catherine the Great or Marie Antoinette, women\u2019s appetite for objects has been portrayed as unbecoming, carnal, obscene.<\/p>\n Delbourgo is at his liveliest when writing about collecting and empire. Those who sailed out into what they believed to be brave new worlds earned plaudits for advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Long\u00a0before the advent of postcolonial studies, they were also seen as looters and frackers. By removing the Parthenon marbles, lamented Byron, Lord Elgin had riven \u201cwhat Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared\u201d. For the explorer and biologist Alfred Wallace, \u201cThe wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute\u00a0civilization\u201d.<\/p>\n Every chapter of A Noble Madness is its own cabinet of curiosities. Collecting has itself been collected \u2013 by novelists such as Oscar Wilde, John Fowles, Orhan Pamuk; film-makers Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho; Sigmund Freud who thought collectors were displaced shaggers. Hokum? Delbourgo prefers such myths and storytelling to modern neuroscientists whose clinical explanations remind him of a lament by Charles Darwin: years of \u201cgrinding general laws out of large collections of facts\u201d, wrote the naturalist, had led to \u201cthe atrophy of that part of his brain on which the higher tastes depend\u201d.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n