The Empty Chair: Nostalgia, Celebrity, Heritage

Abstract: This essay considers the celebrated chair on which Dickens used to sit in his study at Gad's Hill, and which is now housed at the Dickens Museum in London. The presence of the chair is documented from its first material appearance on the London scene, and along its iconic life, focusing on the countless visual appearances, in paintings and prints, performed by the chair during the long nineteenth century and beyond. With its imposing visual presence, the chair, deprived of its sitter, imparted a sense of emptiness, grief, and nostalgia. It continues to convey an odd discursive mixture of realism and fantasy.