ABSTRACT
Herbert Byng Hall's Adventures of a bric-a-brac Hunter was one of many handbooks published for the infatuated with the desire to acquire in the Victorian period. This chapter explored negative attitudes towards male bric-a-brackers in Victorian fiction and puts forward a case for the recognition of more affirmative readings. The first part of the chapter discusses the problem that objects present to Victorian authors and their critics. The second part considers fictional representations of bric-a-brac collecting and the ways in which they are implicated in discourses surrounding the construction of gendered, corporeal identities, an area largely ignored by 'thing theory' Bric-a-brac gets a bad press in nineteenth-century fiction. From Honore de Balzac's Cousin Pons to Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature, bric-a-brac collecting is seen as a dubious activity. In 1888 Ronald Sutherland Gower wrote a book about his private collection titled Bric-a-brac or, Some photoprints illustrating art objects at Gower Lodge, Windsor.
