Selfhood and the Importance of Keeping Hold

The final chapter of the book takes a different focus and works through a particular rhythm. The chapter seeks to explore the value at stake not in the possession itself, but rather in the relationship of possession the owner held with it. It wants to further understand why maintaining possession over time was so important and what it did in cultural and social terms. The chapter does so by focusing on a single novel, Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782). The novel is deeply concerned with questions of property and examines what happens when property and possessions are lost. As such, it offers an important lens through which to explore the value of keeping hold. The chapter particularly examines how maintaining possession of your things was important to the broader project so important within eighteenth-century culture: that of maintaining self-possession. We know that possessions were important to the construction and display of the self, and here we see how the loss of such possessions threatened that project.