Emily Rohrbach, visiting assistant professor of English, attended the "Victorian Literature and Culture: Bodies and Things" conference on Sept. 27 at Mansfield College, Oxford University, UK. Rohrbach gave a paper titled "Byron and the Future of the Museum," which explored the "aesthetics of history" in Byron's comic epic Don Juan in relation to the early 19th century rise of the modern museum as a form of historical knowledge. In Don Juan, Byron envisions a future in which an archaeological dig would uncover the body of George IV as a historical relic for a "new museum"; the comic image, she suggested, registers the poet's aversion to the politics of the burgeoning museum culture.
Developing in a structure of digressions, moreover, the poem aesthetically resists the ideology of cultural-historical progress which museums were being built specifically to illustrate. Rohrbach identified, finally, a possible historical inspiration for Byron's vision of George IV's body on display; in 1816, William Bullock had employed Napoleon's former driver, whose two fingers had been lost and whose legs were shot with bullets in the line of duty (his body a visible sign of the Napoleonic wars), to stand over the London exhibition of his recent purchase, Napoleon's coach.
Developing in a structure of digressions, moreover, the poem aesthetically resists the ideology of cultural-historical progress which museums were being built specifically to illustrate. Rohrbach identified, finally, a possible historical inspiration for Byron's vision of George IV's body on display; in 1816, William Bullock had employed Napoleon's former driver, whose two fingers had been lost and whose legs were shot with bullets in the line of duty (his body a visible sign of the Napoleonic wars), to stand over the London exhibition of his recent purchase, Napoleon's coach.
