John Plotz. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780691135168. Price: US$35.00/£ 24.95

Devoted to Victorian England’s love for objects, John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move is an engrossing study of cultural meanings in “objects, practices, persons,” and national consciousness (9). In an age of heightened global traffic of material commodities, physical bodies, and cultural mores, objects such as those photographed on the cover of this book – a rocking horse, a cork and leather cricket ball, a silver teapot, and a weathered book – and hundreds beside, avers Plotz, served the empire new ways to imagine “community, national identity, and even liberal selfhood on the move” (xii-xiv). Nineteenth-century discourses on portable properties as evidenced through “representational practices” and flourishing “aesthetic assumptions” are symptoms of “global” living in the Victorian era (170). These discourses variously mediate imperial diasporic experiences or navigate constructions of national identity in the context of England’s situation vis-à-vis Greater Britain. Plotz writes in his chapter “Strawberries in India” that material objects are not merely commodities with market value but tokens of “enduring Englishness overseas” for Victorians living abroad. For expatriates like Emily Eden, objects as different as rare strawberry patches and Dickens’s new novel transcend their material values to represent the portability of national culture and “familial heritage.” These objects craft particular relations between property and proprietor to arrange spaces that “keep one English in the Indian wilds” (46; 57-58). “[P]ortaging of sentiment in beloved objects” and the “need to develop auratic [and] somatic […] forms of storing personal and familial memories” through portable objects, explains Plotz, were “a predictable, even a necessary, development in a world of increasingly successful commodity flow” (17). Yet, representations of objects that announce respite from alien culture and attachment to homeland paradoxically fracture such imaginaries. As Plotz shows in his first chapter, on Victorian “diamond tales,” these precious objects pose a disruptive threat to imaginary notions of community and identity. Diamonds as objects, Plotz explains, are split between material value and sentimental possession. But it is their “persistent refusal to turn either into pure liquidity or pure bearers of sentimental value” that situates these objects at “troubling intersections between clear categories” thereby distorting identities formed around them (25). Plotz’s analysis of Wilkie Collins’s 1868 masterpiece, The Moonstone, shows exactly how flow and counter-flow of objects in the age of empire exacerbated the tension between diamonds as fungible objects and diamonds as sentimental possessions. For unlike Anthony Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds (1871-73) where the problematic around the precious necklace is grounded in the legality of exchange versus sentimental possession of the heirloom, in Collins’s novel the evocative resonance of the moonstone as a “portable metonym for India” contributes to the volatile character of the stone and vexes human relations around it: The stone’s checkered history – its evocation of the traumatic memories of the Indian Mutiny and the threat it poses to the collective peace and tranquility of the English home – makes it a liminal object par excellence. Likewise, as loot it is not a legal personal possession open to exchange nor an object around which sentimental attachment can be formed without incurring serious risk of bodily harm from the Brahmins who claim the stone as their own. The constitutive duality of the object erects a barrier against seamless assimilation of the Blood Diamond into the flow of capital as much as it vitiates circulation of sentiments around it. The Moonstone conveys anxiety over “portability in reverse,” of Indian bodies and traumatic colonial memories “making it to England unscathed” (43). The troubling peregrinations of objects and bodies are at the center of Plotz’s discussions of Victorian novelists such as …