Abstract
In 1880, a donation of the hair of Edward II was given to, and accepted by, Leicester Museum, apparently with no provenance (though the donor’s father was a local historian).1 This was merely the most startling of a number of donations of objects with strong bodily connections made to generally small, local museums in the period 1880–1914. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s hair was given to Bristol Museum in 1902, and gloves from the Franklin expedition were given to Leicester Museum in 1892; additionally, a pillion on which the donor’s grandmother rode behind Sir Isaac Newton was also given to Leicester Museum in 1896, and the cap of a Mahdi soldier was given to Warrington Museum in 1904.2 Additionally, several objects associated solely with the donor’s family were also donated to museums, and again show a close connection with the actual bodies of these ancestors. Examples include a muslin neckerchief belonging to and made by the donor’s mother and a baby’s bonnet from the donor’s family.3
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Notes
See James Thompson, The History of Leicester from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Seventeenth Century (Leicester: Crossley, 1849); ‘Leicester Museum Accession Book’, 1880–96. Manuscript. Leicester Museum.
See Bristol Museum, Report of the Museum Committee 1902–3 (Bristol: Bristol Council, 1903); ‘Leicester Museum Accession Book’, 1892, 1896; ‘Warrington Museum Receiving Book’, 1880–1914 (1904). Manuscript. Warrington Museum.
See Kate Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 76, 83;
Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
See Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 116.
Jeffrey David Feldman, ‘Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem’, in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 259.
See George Daniel, ‘The Presumed Disinterment of Milton’, in Love’s Last Labour Not Lost (London: Pickering, 1863), pp. 89–104.
See Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 8.
Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 4.
See Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800 (London: Polity Press, 1990).
Quoted in Paul A. Pickering, ‘A “Grand Ossification”: William Cobbett and the Commemoration of Tom Paine’, in Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 60, 62 (emphasis original)
Pickering, ‘A “Grand Ossification”’, p. 64. See also Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Penguin, 1988).
See Samuel Alberti, ‘The Museum Affect: Visiting Collections of Anatomy and Natural History’, in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 391.
See Edward Alexander, ‘William Bullock: Little-Remembered Museologist and Showman’, Curator, 28 (1985), 117–47;
Susan M. Pearce, ‘William Bullock, Collections and Exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816–1825’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20 (2008), 17–35.
See Iman Hamam, ‘“A Race for Incorporation”: Ancient Egypt and Its Mummies in Science and Popular Culture’, in The Victorians and the Ancient World: Archaeology and Classicism in Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Richard Pearson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 25–40;
Nicholas Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28 (1994), 24–51.
See Claire Loughney, ‘Colonialism and the Development of the English Provincial Museum 1823–1914’, unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University, 2006;
Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Susan M. Pearce, Archaeological Curatorship (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
See Hill, Public Museums; Samuel Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009);
Frances Larson, An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Oliver A. Douglas, ‘Folklore, Survivals and the Neo-Archaic: The Materialist Character of Late Nineteenth-Century Homeland Ethnography’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 223–44;
Robert McCombe, ‘Anglo-Saxon Artifacts and Nationalist Discourse: Acquisition, Interpretation and Display in the Nineteenth Century’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 139–60;
Alison Petch, ‘Muddying the Waters: The Pitt-Rivers Collection from 1850–2011’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 161–80.
See Neil Chambers, ‘Joseph Banks, the British Museum and Collections’, in Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. G. W. Anderson et al. (London: British Museum Press, 2003), pp. 99–113;
Simon Knell, The Culture of English Geology 1815–1851: A Science Revealed Through its Collecting (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Alberti, Nature and Culture.
See Thomas Greenwood, Museums and Art Galleries (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1888).
Frances Larson, ‘The Curious and the Glorious: Science and the British Past at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 181–202.
Alison Booth, ‘Houses and Things: Literary House Museums as Collective Biography’, in Museums and Biographies, ed. Kate Hill (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming 2012); Pascoe, Hummingbird Cabinet, p. 3.
See Chauncey C. Loomis, ‘The Arctic Sublime’, in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 104.
See Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007);
Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Knell, The Culture of English Geology;
Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender, and Scientific Practice’, in Material Women 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 247–64.
William Flinders Petrie, Methods and Aims of Archaeology (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 193.
See ‘Leicester Museum Accession Book’, 1889; Tim Schadla-Hall, Tom Sheppard: Hull’s Great Collector (Beverley: Highgate, 1988);
Cynthia Brown, Cherished Possessions: A History of New Walk Museum and Leicester City Council Museums Service (Leicester: Leicester City Council, 2002).
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 136.
Marcia Pointon, ‘Materialising Mourning: Hair, Jewellery and the Body’, in Material Memories, Design and Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p. 40.
See Thomas Sutton, ‘The Library and Museums’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 85 (1946), 82.
See Sutton, ‘Library and Museums’, 82–7; M. A. Lower and R. Chapman, ‘The Antiquities Preserved in the Museum of Lewes Castle’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 18 (1866), 60–73.
See Richard Altick, The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions 1600–1862 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), pp. 333–5.
See Patrick Dunae, ‘Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth-Century Boys’ Literature and Crime’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1979), 133–50.
See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995);
Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. xvii.
Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter 1881–1897, ed. Leslie Linder (London: Warne, 1966), pp. 91, 136.
See Kate Hill, ‘Collecting Authenticity: Domestic, Familial and Everyday “Old Things” in English Museums, 1850–1939’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 203–22; Booth, ‘Houses and Things’.
See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 19.
Alison Landsberg, ‘America, the Holocaust and the Mass Culture of Memory: Towards a Radical Politics of Empathy’, New German Critique, 71 (1997), 64.
Susan Crane, ‘Story, History and the Passionate Collector’, in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, ed. Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 187.
See Douglas, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’; Kavanagh, History Curatorship; Alla Myzelev, ‘Collecting Peasant Europe: Peasant Utilitarian Objects as Museum Artifacts’, in Material Cultures 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 171–90.
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© 2012 Kate Hill
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Hill, K. (2012). Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Museums. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_8
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