AustLit

'In the book of essays titled The Art of Literary Biography, Jürgen Schlaeger recounts how a German colleague visiting the Dickens House Museum in London took particular interest in Dickens’s study. There his friend watched an English schoolboy enter the room, carefully read through the words on an information sheet and then shout to his classmates: ‘Dickens’s chair! Dickens’s chair!’ Other children rushed in and began copying out the description, some of them also sketching the object itself. For a German, Schlaeger reports, this form of ‘celebrity fetishism’ was astonishing. Yet, as he explained, it stemmed from a long history of hero-worship in the English speaking world. Australians, for example, also revere their heroes through relics, with public collections preserving such items as Captain James Cook’s tea cup, Ned Kelly’s armour, Henry Handel Richardson’s ouija board and Dame Nellie Melba’s shoes. In the case of the composer Percy Grainger, we have a whole museum housing clothing, handmade machinery, musical instruments, artworks and even his toy sailing boat.' (Introduction)