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The Art and Science of Collecting
Watson's relic box transforms the classical art of training the memory to function like a house with rooms for storing ideas into a physical box with compartments for holding evidence. During his brief stint as a Philadelphia bookseller before becoming cashier of the Bank of Germantown in 1814, Watson joined with the Baltimore publisher Edward J. Coale to publish a memory manual Mnemonika; or, Chronological Tablets (1812). According to the preface, "some are so fortunate by nature, that their minds may be compared to a miser's chest, from which nothing is ever lost. Others must rely upon art for that which nature has denied." Mnemonika is a list of "remarkable occurrences" rather than a program for training the mind, but it presumes that readers already understand their memories architecturally as houses or as chests with compartments. In his box, Watson turned this art of cultivating a mental miser's chest into a physical artwork of wood, brass, and relic materials. But in keeping with his interest in the curiosity of ordinary local life, Watson did not order an ersatz medieval coffer for his collection. Instead, the form of a rectangular body perched on small feet evoked other common household objects like a Pennsylvania spice box—a receptacle for valuables—and sewing and jewelry boxes. Although the box turned "remarkable" relic wood into an artful shape, that form was still, like the histories Watson would collect in it, the ordinary work of everyday people.
Fig. 3. Advertisement for fancy goods from Paxton's Philadelphia Directory and Register for 1818. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Watson's collecting and publishing also drew on the scientific methods of natural history. His relic box was not a purely personal affair but was oriented, through both his labels and his collecting practices, towards an outside audience. Watson documented the significance of nearly all of the objects in the box—including the wood of the box itself—by attaching paper labels. In addition to demonstrating the rational for each item's inclusion, the labels also reveal a network of collectors. For example, the "handle of Wm Penn's Bookcase" was first acquired by a Peter Worrel who gave it to Ge[orge] Dillwyn who gave it to H. Coleman who, finally, gave it to Watson. Relic collecting required more than making private, sentimental connections to objects. Devotees integrated themselves into a larger social web much like the networks that connected colonial and metropolitan naturalists. Watson also drew other members of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which he helped to found, into his efforts to document the past using local informants. Like the natural historians who obtained specimens from indigenous people and slaves, Watson and other Historical Society members systematically collected oral histories from elderly persons, including African Americans and Native Americans, for the Annals. In many ways, therefore, the relic box and Watson's writings represent early forays into archaeology and social history, which both use empirical methods derived from the collecting practices of natural historians.
By blending art and science into a physical object, Watson's relic box ultimately connects history to the "fancy" style of many other contemporary material objects that also sought to engage both the intellect and the senses. "Fancy goods," as demonstrated by the inventory in this Philadelphia merchant's advertisement, consisted of games, "surprising" sword canes or telescopes, and small, personal objects like scissors, shaving cases, lockets, hair brushes, soaps, and liquor flasks (fig. 3). Like the relics in Watson's box, some of these objects are delicate and require careful handling, others are linked to women's private lives, and still others are ornamental containers for valuable possessions like the relic box itself. Overall, according to decorative arts expert Sumpter Priddy, the fancy material style aimed to elicit a "wide range of emotional responses … delight, awe, surprise, and laughter. These were triggered not just by the stunning nature of the objects," Priddy maintains, "but also by the dynamic combination of images and allusions that connected the viewer's imagination to the larger world." Watson sought to imbue history with the sensational and sensual qualities of this fancy style. "If we would make the incidents of olden time familiar and popular by seizing on the affections and stirring the feelings of modern generations," Watson explained in his Historic Tales of Olden Time (1832), "we must first delight them with the comic and the strange of history and afterwards win them to graver researches." Watson's historiographical contribution was that serious historical narratives could wait.
