F.G. Fisher's Stratford Models at the Rosenbach

I've been spending part of a day each week at one particular literary museum in Philadelphia, The Rosenbach. I first visited the museum in September. I went to see the Marianne Moore room, where the museum has recreated Marianne Moore's living room item-by -item in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the Rosenbach house. I was so interested in what I found in the museum, aside from the Marianne Moore Collection—which I can’t rave about enough, that I joined their docent class this fall.

As part of the class we wrote about three objects in the collection. My favorite objects this week are a set of models that Dr. Rosenbach collected in 1916. A portion of what follows is from my research for the class.

Dr. Rosenbach loved Shakespeare and collected a number of important editions of early collections of Shakespeare’s plays, some of which ended up in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare collecting has long been in fashion and may have well been the first literary collecting where collectors saw objects associated with an author with a pseudo-religious fascination.

The famous Shakespeare Mulberry is a great example. Supposedly, Shakespeare planted the tree when he retired to “the New Place,” his final home in Stratford. The mulberry tree he planted inspired so many on-lookers that the last owner of the New Place, Reverend Francis Gastrell ripped the tree out and destroyed the house shortly thereafter. The legend goes that the townspeople were so angry that he had removed the tree, that they lobbed stones through the windows of the house. Gastrell eventually razed the house after the damage. Apparently, some locals thought to salvage the tree and make mementos out of the wood. These mementos were such a craze that "true" relics and fakes were often sold to unsuspecting, or even suspecting tourists. When Washington Irving traveled to Stratford he was offered such a relic from a man who claimed to have helped remove the tree. Irving declined, but procured his own “relic,”--a sprig from a tree in the courtyard where Shakespeare was buried (see The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York G. P. Putnam's sons, 1888, p. 354). Even Mark Twain and his wife, after visiting the birthplace in 1874, brought back a sapling that was a descendant of the Shakespeare Mulberry to plant in their yard in Hartford, CT. (Twain writes a hilarious account of the tree’s troubled life in a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post, which you can find here).

At the Rosenbach you can see a whole set of papier maché models of the buildings in Stratford, including Shakespeare's birthplace and a rendition of the Mulberry tree. These were made by F.G. Fisher, a librarian and amateur actor (and the father of the famous actress, Clara Fisher). Made in 1830, they speak to how crazy the Shakespeare commemoration bonanza has been for more than two hundred years now. Scholars have argued that until 1769, most people interested in an author visited an author’s grave. Many even made rubbings of Shakespeare’s gravestone. But in 1769, the actor David Garrick brought a booming industry to Stratford to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday in an elaborate “Jubilee.” The celebration focused not on his grave, but on the other historical sites that were associated with him, especially his birthplace.

Garrick hung a banner depicting the rising sun in the window of the room where he believed that Shakespeare was born. By the time that Fisher created his model, the birthplace may well have been recognizable to most Shakespeare enthusiasts. The story of Shakespeare’s banishment from Stratford had already become popular legend akin to Washington and the cherry tree in the U.S. By 1830, Stratford was a site of national pilgrimage. The models were just in time for the second great celebration of Shakespeare in Stratford—the Second Royal Gala Festival. If a Shakespeare enthusiast could not make the trip to Stratford, perhaps he or she could have seen Fisher’s models on display in London.

The Rosenbach collection of Fisher’s models is fascinating and they aren’t even close to the most exciting thing that the museum has to offer.

See J. Jarvis, A Descriptive Account of the Second Royal Gala Festival, at Stratford-Upon-Avon...April 23, 1830...In Commemoration of the Natal Day of Skakspeare. London: R. Lapworth, 1830. See also for a brief biographical description of Frederick George Fisher the reprint of his daughter’s 1897 autobiography, Clara Fisher and Douglas Taylor, Autobiography of Clara Fisher Maeder (New York,: B. Franklin, 1970). Here, he is described as an "amateur actor and Shakespearean scholar of repute" (xii) and as a “gentleman of fine literary taste, [who] was at one time, proprietor of a noted library at Brighton, and afterward an active auctioneer in London." (Appendix 134).

See Nicola Watson’s work on graveside literary tourism in chapter one of Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007).

Shakespeare’s gravestone was so well known to even Americans that some travel accounts of visits to Stratford omitted its description for fear of boring readers. See "The Birthplace of Shakespeare," The New York Times 15 Aug 1860.