Christie's

Christie's appears in the novel as an auction house through which objects associated with Randolph Henry Ash enter the market. Its catalogue alerts Mortimer Cropper to a sale of Victorian-era objects, including a needlecase traditionally believed to have belonged to Ellen Ash and a ring said to contain some of Ash’s hair. The brief reference places commercial acquisition alongside the novel’s larger contest over who may preserve, interpret, and possess the material remains of literary lives.

Auction and Collecting

At Barrett’s Hotel, Cropper finds the Christie's catalogue among his accumulated letters and notices. The sale offers a needlecase associated by tradition with Ellen Ash and a crystal-cavity ring reputed to hold a few hairs of Ash. The catalogue does not establish the objects’ provenance as fact: the needlecase is traditionally attributed to Ellen, while the hair is said to be Ash’s. Their uncertain associations are nevertheless enough to make them desirable to collectors.

Cropper expects that the Ash Museum may bid for the objects, and he intends to bid himself. He imagines placing the needlecase and hair in the hexagonal glass room at the centre of the Stant Collection, among relics belonging to Ash, his wife, family, and acquaintances. In that imagined destination, the auction’s scattered possessions would become part of an ordered scholarly collection, preserved in regulated conditions and made available within institutional limits.

Objects, Memory, and Ownership

The catalogue’s offerings belong to a broader economy of Ash-related traces. Cropper’s collection already includes clippings from Ash’s hair, whose changing appearance records the poet’s life and death; the newly advertised curl would extend that material archive. The needlecase, meanwhile, links the market to Ellen Ash and to the intimate household surrounding the poet. Both objects promise access to a past through things that can be bought, classified, and displayed, although their associations remain partly dependent on tradition and report.

Christie's thus marks one point in the movement of literary remains from private or uncertain custody toward institutional collecting. The novel places that commercial route beside other forms of transmission: family inheritance, scholarly preservation, gifts, and the concealment or destruction of private papers. The sale catalogue makes the objects visible to Cropper, but his ambition to acquire and enshrine them also shows how preservation can entail control over access and meaning.