Emma Peacocke's Romanticism and the Museum is a well-researched and carefully put together study of the place of the museum in romantic-era Britain. She convincingly argues for the important role played by the museum in shaping the British public sphere and national community in response to the trauma of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It does much to synthesize and bring to a wider audience the arguments of other critics about the ways in which the idea of the museum in this era evolved in direct competition with the dominant French paradigm of the Louvre. Its four chapters offer case histories of the museum in British romantic writing—in William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and a group of journalists and poets responding to the Elgin marbles controversy, principally Lord Byron and Horace Smith. Collectively these chapters point to the significance of the literary and journalistic representation of the museum as a crucial space for historicizing impulses to emerge, and with them reflections on the state of the nation. Individually, their close readings and careful research give to these chapters a fresh view of familiar texts and writers by juxtaposing them with what were, until recently, neglected archives of literary and journalistic writing.

Since (unlike its French counterpart) the British idea of the museum and especially the museum of natural science is largely a Victorian invention, this book digs back to unearth a prehistory of the formation of the museum as a recognizably modern institution. To that extent, Peacocke's book visits museum-like or proto-museum spaces, including semi-private art galleries and monasteries, in order to argue, after Svetlana Alpers, for a more expansive “museum effect.” Eschewing the dominant theoretical, Foucault-informed modes of analyzing museum space initiated by Tony Bennett, Peacocke takes instead an archival approach in order to offer an historical reflection on what various documents, canonical and noncanonical, can tell us about how spectators and organizers of (principally) artistic display imagined their relation to the past and to public space. Even so, the book makes some quite bold claims. For example, in relation to The Prelude in chapter 1, Peacocke argues “that debates over the Romantic museum and strategies of display are at the heart of Wordsworth's immensely influential text” (11). Such an approach situates the relatively neglected moment of Wordsworth's visit to the Carmelite convent in Paris (a passage from Book 9) at the heart of the poem and seeks to argue for a parallel between the aesthetic displacement of the newly nationalized treasures of this and other monastic spaces in France and the oft-argued poetics of displacement in Wordsworth. If Peacocke cannot quite support the daring claim that the museum is the master trope both of revolution and of poem, perhaps this is in part because Wordsworth studies are now a long way past the idea of “displacement.”

Peacocke's subsequent chapters, though, build together to offer a successful case about the romantic museum. Chapter 2, which looks at Waverley, offers a close and historically attentive reading of the novel's descriptions of Holyrood gallery, where Scott's critique of the mythologizing tendencies of Jacobite history are, as Peacocke shows, carefully encoded in his presentation of Stuart portraiture. Without relying on some of the heavyweights in romantic art theory, such as John Barrell, nor in Scott criticism, especially James Chandler and Mark Salber Phillips (whose 2013 On Historical Distance, which includes a chapter on history painting, is oddly missing from this analysis), Peacocke here offers a thoroughly engaging argument about the ways in which doomed Jacobites such as Fergus leave the narrative by turning into art objects. The following chapter on Edgeworth's Harrington offers a compelling close reading of the psychology of the novel, and notes the ways in which its proto-museum enables “a deconstruction of nationalist mythologies” (87) and with it an overcoming of the main protagonist's hysterical anti-Semitism. Again, the chapter is supported by excellent research, especially around the reception of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Murillo in romantic Britain.

It is in the final chapter that Peacocke is able to offer her most compelling case of all, revisiting the unease felt by liberals over the “acquisition” of the Elgin Marbles. What really stands out here is the way in which she builds on recent arguments for the importance of romantic magazines as a genre of writing worthy of attention in its own right in order to offer a superb account of the rivalry between the London Magazine and Blackwood's. In doing so, she sheds genuinely new light on the ways in which readings of Phidias's sculptures (especially those by Horace Smith in two articles in the London Magazine) offered coded commentaries on the state of the nation, as well as responding to awkward debates about the site specificity of the ancient artworks and the violence that had wrenched them out of context. The approach taken here neatly returns to the question of “displacement” that opens the book's main analysis. The book ends with a short coda on romantic natural history via Byron's jokes about Cuvier and George IV in canto 9 of Don Juan.

Altogether, Romanticism and the Museum offers a considered and meticulously researched study of one of the most important cultural phenomena of romantic-period Britain. The historical approach taken here does much to shed light on the status of this institution—or its prehistory—in a wide range of texts produced in the period. While it is refreshing to see a book move away from some of the dominant theoretical paradigms of museum studies, it is still somewhat frustrating that Peacocke does not seize the opportunity that her careful work offers to come to some broader conclusions about what the romantic period's “museum effect” constituted, or how it mediated history. But this is a significant book.