The Chronicles Of Peculiar Desires In The Briti... 🎉

To the modern eye, a Victorian collector of sea cucumbers or phrenological skulls was a harmless eccentric. But to the psychoanalytically inclined, the mania for taxonomy was a vessel for desires too dangerous to name.

To read these chronicles is to understand that there is no such thing as a “normal” desire. There are only desires that have been given a clean uniform and those that have been banished to the colonies of the self. The British Empire is dead. Long live its peculiar ghosts. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...

: A "Completionist" run typically takes about 5 hours . Critical Reception To the modern eye, a Victorian collector of

The fragment Julian held was a profile of a woman, her hair carved so cunningly into the natural bands of the stone that it seemed to shift under the gallery lights. As the museum doors locked for the night, Julian noticed a peculiar phenomenon: the "Unlucky Mummy" lid in the adjacent gallery seemed to cast a shadow longer than it should, and a cold draft swept through the Hall of Mesopotamia, where the 4,000-year-old Sumerian Temple Guardian stood watch. There are only desires that have been given

Entanglements of Prose, Poetry, and Empire: 1800–1900 (Part II)

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What desire drove this? A peculiar longing to touch death, to possess a body that had outlasted empires. For some, it was necrophilic in the psychological sense—an attraction to the absolute stillness of the preserved corpse. The novelist Algernon Blackwood wrote of a man who fell in love with a mummy in the British Museum, sleeping in the gallery at night. Fiction, perhaps. But the number of security incidents involving visitors trying to kiss or caress the Egyptian sarcophagi suggests otherwise.