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Abstract
This article has as its focus a queer object – an otherwise unremarkable ticket for an eighteenth-century assembly or ball in a collection of tickets made by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, an influential figure in the development of the British Museum in the Victorian period. I argue that the ticket is a tribute to a larger collection, also in the British Museum, made by Sarah Sophia Banks, in order to make claims for the attention to printed ephemera as a queer science that was foundational in the conceptualization and practice of archives of all kinds. The queer object of Franks’s ticket, in relation to the history of printed ephemera, is used to contextualize and historicize debates about ephemera in contemporary queer theory and cultural studies more generally.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Research on Banks’s collections is growing: see Credland, “Sarah and Joseph Banks and Archery in the Eighteenth Century,” and “Sarah and Joseph Banks contd.”; Pincott; Eagleton, “Collecting African Money in Georgian London,” and “Sarah Sophia Banks, Adam Afzelius and a Coin from Sierra Leone.” Arlene Leis’s 2013 Ph.D. represents the first significant study of the material in the Department of Prints and Drawings (Leis, “Sarah Sophia Banks”). See also Leis, “Displaying Art and Fashion,” and “Ephemeral Histories.”
2 British Museum no. 1867,0120.1; British Museum no. Franks.1; British Museum no. Am,St.400.a.
3 British Museum no. 1938,3.19.2.
4 The signs of wear and tear indicate that the ticket either (a) was used carelessly on the night of the ball in question, (b) may have been used on multiple occasions or (c) was subsequently used as a plaything.
5 Printed ephemera could be described as proto-photographic in its capacity to document transient social experience, as indeed photography itself can be seen as imaged ephemerality. More work needs to be done on printed ephemera as part of the pre-history of photography.
6 For work in what might be called the “poetics of the archive” that draws attention to research as affective experience, see, for example, Steedman; Farge.
7 For example: Kirschenbaum; Chun; Gitelman. For a discussion of ephemera and ephemerality in performance studies, see Schneider 94–96.
8 Muñoz 10, derived from Raymond Williams’ influential idea for affect theory of a “structure of feelings.”
9 Johnson 11. For an excellent study of the rise of jobbing print, see Raven.
10 For a more detailed discussion of this, see Russell.
11 As Leah Price shows, the codex-form book was also prone to perishability and diverse uses, apart from reading (Price).
12 For Romantic bibliomania, see, for example, Connell; Lynch; Jensen; Klancher; Ferris.
13 The London Literary Gazette 26 May 1821 quoted in Ferris 17.
14 See Sherbo. Rumours and newspaper publicity concerning a sodomitical relationship between Heber and Charles Henry Hartshorne led Heber to move to the Continent between 1825 and 1831.
15 “Obituary” 109. In this respect, Heber’s collecting mania can be seen as a form of “material deviance” that Scott Herring identifies as developing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Herring).
16 For Sloane’s collections of ephemera, see Mandelbrote.
17 Abbate 85.