Bare and authentic or full and fake? The dilemma of preserving writers’ houses

Every year, tens of thousands of visitors flock to the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, in order to see where he lived and wrote. Many famous writers’ homes are preserved for visitors, some of whom are devoted readers (and some who know they are supposed to read his or her books). Twain, we can imagine, sat in that chair while writing Huckleberry Finn. However, only a small portion of the objects one sees were actually there when the writer lived in the house. Most of the original pieces were either sold off or dispersed to family members.

The cost of building this 1874 house and furnishing it, in fact, was too much for Twain, and he and his family needed to sell most of it and move abroad in 1891. (Much of what visitors see there are either reproductions or ‘period’ objects that look like the furniture the Clemenses actually owned, based on photographs.) Then again, authenticity is probably less the goal than giving a certain impression of the writer and his world, as the Mark Twain House has Twain impersonators (dressed in white suits) regaling visitors with amusing anecdotes. Visitors get an immersive, rather than an authentic, experience. Should it matter that we’re not really seeing what we expect to see?

The Louisa May Alcott Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, is stronger on authenticity. One looks at ‘the actual furniture the Alcotts sat on, the pillows they embroidered, their sewing bags, May’s original paintings and sketches’, Jan Turnquist, Orchard House’s director, noted. ‘If the Alcotts were able to come back to life and walk through the doors, they would feel at home, because nothing has been moved.’ Two of Louisa’s nephews, who established the house as a place of pilgrimage for devotees of her books in 1912, ‘made sure that everything was the Alcotts’.