I’m excited to be presenting my paper ‘Publishing Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’: Reading, Reception and Reputation at Sandown Cottage’ at the forthcoming Reading the Country House conference, to be held at MMU in November. The conference focuses on the ways in which the country house was ‘made to be read’, whether through the legibility of their decorative schemes or their description in published materials. My abstract for the conference is included below.
Publishing Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’: Reading, Reception and Reputation at Sandown Cottage
This paper unpacks a complex episode in the relationship between interior decoration, travel writing, and identity formation in late eighteenth-century Britain. Examining John Wilkes’s summer residence Sandown Cottage (commonly known as ‘Villakin’) on the Isle of Wight, it provides an unprecedented consideration of the aesthetic programme of Wilkes’s country home and its role in constructing and reflecting its owner’s multifarious identities. Focusing on published accounts of Sandown Cottage, it situates descriptions of Wilkes’s home within the contexts of taste, sociability, and domestic tourism, highlighting the centrality of visual and material culture within these texts. Describing the residence as fitted up ‘with every regard and attention to elegance,’ such accounts consistently related the house’s ornamentation to Wilkes’s becoming personal qualities. This paper will accordingly consider how the publication and circulation of Sandown Cottage’s collections and decoration in contemporary travel writing functioned as a kind of reputation management; neutralising Wilkes’s radical politics and instead facilitating his self-presentation as a consummately refined host and tasteful art collector. Discussing a broad variety of visual and material culture and its representation, the paper challenges divisions between the fine and decorative arts, interior and exterior spaces, and between the material object and the written word more broadly.
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