Abstract
Early nineteenth-century Londoners seeking diversion (and perhaps even a little useful instruction) were spoilt for choice. In addition to a dizzying array of visual and theatrical entertainments there were a wide variety of exhibitions—of natural history specimens, artworks and antiquities, waxworks and automata, models and mock-ups—all laying claim to their attention (and their pocketbooks). The Regency period in particular saw the formation of a number of significant museums, reflecting the prevailing tendencies—and tensions—in emerging cultures of collection and display. In Piccadilly in 1812, William Bullock unveiled his “London Museum,” purpose-built with a faux-Egyptian façade, which would become a centre for popular commercial exhibitions right through the nineteenth century; in 1813, Sir John Soane moved his extensive collections into his new home at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they would be constituted as the “House and Museum of Sir John Soane.” Meanwhile, at the rapidly growing British Museum, Lord Elgin’s marbles—the last shipment of which, consisting of 86 large crates, had arrived in London in 1812—finally went on display in 1816.
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Notes
The Literary Gazette (April 10, 1824), 237; Michael P. Costeloe, William Bullock: Connoisseur and Virtuoso of the Egyptian Hall: Piccadilly to Mexico (1773–1849), Bristol: University of Bristol, 2008, 6.
See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, and Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006, 96. As she elaborates, “Napoleon had associated himself with so many physical objects that the supply of Napoleonic possessions was bottomless.”
Richard Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978, 439.
Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum, London: André Deutsch, 1973, 97.
John Morley, Regency Design, 1790–1840: Gardens, Buildings, Interiors, Furniture, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993, 223. See also Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home 1750–1850, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.
Helene Furján, Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theater, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, 175.
Nicole Reynolds, Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010, 114.
Visions of Ruin: Architectural Fantasies & Designs for Garden Follies, with Crude Hints Towards A History of My House, London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1999, 61–74.
W. H. Mullens, “Some Museums of Old London: William Bullock’s London Museum,” Museums Journal 17 (1917–18): 133.
A Companion to Bullock’s Museum, London, 1810, 81.
The aquatint published in Ackermann’s Repository of Arts for 1810 offers an excellent overview of the exhibition and its contents. For general information about Bullock, I am drawing from Altick, Shows; Costeloe, William Bullock; Mullens, “Some Museums”; and Susan Pearce, “William Bullock: Collections and Exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816–1825,” Journal of the History of Collections 20:1 (2008): 17–35.
The report remarks that “more than 22,000 have already visited it during the month it has been opened.” Susan Pearce, “William Bullock: Inventing a Visual Language of Objects,” Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed, ed. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 18.
Bullock, Companion, 14th edn, 1813. iv.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993, 162.
Bullock, Descriptive Synopsis of the Roman Gallery, London, 1816, 4. See also Costeloe, William Bullock, 89–91.
The price was £2,500 pounds, according to Aleck Abrahams, “The Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 1813–1873,” The Antiquary 2:2 (1906): 61. A more detailed account of this transaction can be found in Costeloe, William Bullock.
Jerzy Kierkuć-Bieliński, “The Architect and the Emperor: The Self-made Man, Soane and Napoleon” in Peace Breaks Out! London and Paris in the Summer of 1814, London: Soane Gallery, 2014, 60.
Eileen Cooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1992, 180.
Edward P. Alexander, Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence, Nashville, Tennessee: The American Association for State and Local History, 1983, 94–95.
Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
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© 2016 Sophie Thomas
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Thomas, S. (2016). Collecting, Cultural Memory, and the Regency Museum. In: Fulford, T., Sinatra, M.E. (eds) The Regency Revisited. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504494_12
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