In Brian Moore's comic novel The Great Victorian Collection (1975), a young Canadian, Anthony Maloney, an assistant professor of British history whose subject is Victorian things, falls asleep in the Sea Winds motel in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and dreams that he is walking through an exhibit of Victorian objects, rivalling and sometimes reproducing those on display in Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851. In a typical aberration of dream life, the collection, which takes up a modern city block, is located not in some virtual London, but, to Anthony's amazement, in the Sea Winds parking lot. He wakes to find himself the custodian of just such an exhibition outside his motel room, whose contents not only perfectly replicate actually existing historical objects – from a glass fountain to a toy engine, to erotic playthings he has only read about – but has created others, many of which were not known to have survived the inevitable triage of history, or even to have ever existed in more than descriptive or imaginary form. Media attention to the collection brings Anthony, as its realiser and reluctant curator, a brief celebrity, but its mysterious origin in his psyche, and its curious dependence for its integrity on his presence at the site of its appearance, ultimately prove fatal to the dreamer and his dream; the story ends with Anthony's macabre death, while the collection – subtly degraded, no longer newsworthy, but not destroyed – survives him.