'Realized day-dreams': Excursions to authors' homes

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century authors' houses in Britain and America as tourist attractions. Architectural historians have traditionally criticized nineteenth-century architecture for its "literary" quality. According to this view, literary influence threatened architecture's integrity and rendered it subordinate to other arts. I take issue with this idea by looking at how nineteenth-century literary tourists sought out authors' houses to supplement the limitations of literature. For these tourists, architecture and its furnishings authenticated literary texts.; I identify a group of authors' houses formed in the first half of the nineteenth century through British-American interactions. Between 1811 and 1825, Scott transformed a Scottish Borders farmhouse into a pseudo-medieval mansion, Abbotsford. Irving visited Scott during his renovations, and nearly two decades later, built his house, Sunnyside. Both authors participated in their residences' designs, built houses into landscapes already depicted in their writings, and used their houses as showplaces. Writers other than Scott and Irving, including Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, laid necessary groundwork for the development of this type.; These houses contribute to our understanding of the house as both a museum and a museum object. I trace the history of this type from its formulation in the first half of the nineteenth century through its informal curation by family members in the second half of the nineteenth century and finally to its formal museumification in the early twentieth century. Because the mechanisms of exhibition were instituted by authors during their lifetimes, survivors' treatments of these houses in the period immediately following their celebrated residents' deaths and before their institutionalization as museums are accessible for analysis. The informal display of these houses prefigured exhibition strategies common in historic house museums of all types. Furthermore, the continued currency of this type in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed for houses not yet deemed properly historical to be restored. In the early twentieth century, however, with the rise of both modernism and the professionalized museum, authors' houses were not only museumified, but also presented as objects themselves.