The British Museum

THE BRITISH MUSEUM

James Hamilton

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AN APOLLO BOOK

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About The British Museum

On 15 January 1759, following the passing of an act of Parliament six years previously, a new museum opened its doors in a house in Bloomsbury. It held and displayed the collections of three men and their families: the physician and entrepreneur Sir Hans Sloane, who donated 71,000 books, dried plants, minerals and antiquities to the nation; the manuscript collection of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton (including the Lindisfarne Gospels and two copies of the Magna Carta); and the 8,000-volume library of the politician and bibliophile Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford.

James Hamilton recounts the remarkable 250-year history of the British Museum, from a more-or-less organized jumble stored in the damp chambers of a crumbling London mansion in the Age of the Enlightenment, to a world-renowned public institution whose collections of more than 8 million objects and artefacts document the evolution of human culture from its beginnings to the present. He explores the cultural context in which the Museum came into being; its subsequent expansion and diversification; the controversies occasioned by some of its acquisitions; and the legacy and influence of the Museum both nationally and globally.

Contents

Welcome Page

About The British Museum

Dedication

Frontispiece

Prologue

1    ‘I went to see Dr Sloan’s curiosities’: The Beginnings

2    ‘The rooms so numerous’:

The British Museum in the Eighteenth Century

3    ‘The Trustees shall have full power at all times’:

Running the Museum in the Early Nineteenth Century

4    ‘The want of accommodation’:

Decades of Reconstruction 1821–1846

5    ‘The expense will no doubt be great,

but so is the nation which is to bear it’:

The Mid-nineteenth Century

6    ‘A more delightful occupation I cannot conceive’:

From the Victorian Age into the Twentieth Century

7    ‘Knowledge gained should be spread and shared’:

The Twentieth Century

8    ‘What a paradise the British Museum is’:

Into the Twenty-first Century

Appendices

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements and Permissions

Endnotes

Index

About James Hamilton

The Landmark Library

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

For Kate, my co-curator in all things

Frontispiece

Prologue

A page from Harley MS 603, The Harley Psalter, an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon copy of The Utrecht Psalter, featuring Psalm 103, ‘The creations of the Lord’.

The British Museum touches all parts. It entered my bloodstream when, as a young student reader in the early 1970s, I entered for the first time the narrow passage (now demolished) which linked the Museum’s entrance hall with the Round Reading Room. I cannot remember what it was that I came to read, but it was nevertheless a kind of birth.

What I do vividly recall, however, are the rooms of the Department of Western Manuscripts, then to the right of the main entrance. There in 1970 I was allowed to handle and look at, on my own, the masterpiece of medieval illumination MS Harley 603, the Anglo-Saxon copy of the ninth-century Utrecht Psalter. Fired up by a talk given in Utrecht the previous year by the Princeton art historian Professor Rosalie Green, in the presence of the original Utrecht Psalter, I wrote to the British Museum to ask if I could look at Harley 603. They gave me a pair of white gloves, and rested the manuscript on a cushion in front of me. There must have been a curator hovering within sight, but I felt myself alone with this magnificent volume, turning its heavy pages freely, looking at the masses of ink-drawn figures that skittered here and there, interweaving themselves with the calligraphy. It was surprisingly well coloured, the figures energetic and liberally choreographed across the pages and among the paragraphs. They had expressive, even theatrical gestures; long, lanky bodies with, in many cases, hardly a trace of a neck. This privilege, to see and hold and turn these thousand-year-old pages, and be trusted to do so, was an illumination in itself, a doorway into a world that I had begun to experience through slides and books. Now, however, it was flooding towards me as proof of the uses of museums.

At around this same time I visited the Department of Prints and Drawings to look at watercolours by the eighteenth-century amateur Thomas Sunderland. They gave me the box, and I was happy. Further down the desk was the department’s Keeper, Edward Croft-Murray, with his large and voluminous presence, going rapidly through another box, turning over mounted drawings, and talking grandly at the top of his penetrating voice about his life and times. That I found discomforting, but perhaps I should have listened to him more closely, as I wondered how museums should present themselves.

In 1972 I was one of the many thousands who queued to see the Tutankhamun exhibition, having in my case come up especially to London on the train from Derby. Long lines of patient people snaked up and down between the metal barriers set out on the forecourt, and we waited an hour or maybe two shuffling towards the steps. There was an ice-cream van with cornets for sale and a mobile café, but most memorable were the people standing quietly together: men in suits and bowler hats; students in jeans; families with children swinging on the barriers; and me.

Queues waiting to go into the 1972 exhibition The Treasures of Tutankhamen at the British Museum.

At last I came face to face in the darkness of the exhibition with the boy King Tut himself. He was shining in reflected light, closely fitted into his glass case, a small tomb after his big sleep in his long tomb in the sand. He gazed out timelessly, as he had since his burial in the Valley of the Kings so many centuries ago; 3,000 years in the dark. The temporary exhibition floor creaked under the weight of his supplicants and admirers as I addressed him wordlessly, and moved on.

***

Museums do not just appear; like all other life forms, they evolve. Even a museum that might seem to have been ready made, such as the Wallace Collection in London, grew first as a private collection before it became, by the shifting plates of time, the nation’s property.

The British Museum, described by Virginia Woolf as ‘one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain’,¹ was once a more-or-less organized jumble stored in the large damp chambers of a crumbling London mansion, awaiting more and yet more cartloads to add to the pile. Initial attempts at order soon got out of hand, but it is very clear that from the start the curators of these various and varied collections had a strong sense of responsibility threatened only by lack of money and human frailty. It is the task of a museum, and the duty of its curators, to create order out of jumble, knowledge out of order, and, out of knowledge, an understanding of the world and of humanity’s place within it. The British Museum is a shining example of the values of this practice.

Museums – and this includes art galleries which are a variant of the main form – are a high-water mark of civilization, a public manifestation of civic good that assumes that a knowledge of the past and an understanding of human aspiration and achievement is a prerequisite for good government. Once we start chipping away at our museums we are chipping away at civilization’s point. How we got from a disorganized jumble to ‘one solid immense mound’ reflective of human aspiration is the burden of this story.

1

The Beginnings

‘I went to see

Dr Sloan’s curiosities’

The British Museum is the product of a very British piece of creative thinking. Rich and fascinating collections were of course held in other European nations, but these were largely in princely, ducal or ecclesiastical ownership, and where the public was admitted it was under strictly filtered conditions. None, in the mid-eighteenth century, was the property of the people. However, before the wars with France, before the French Revolution, before the ‘loss’ of America and eighty years before the Reform Act, things in Britain took an oddly British, even cautious, revolutionary path. The catalyst here was the reading of the humane and thoughtful will of Sir Hans Sloane, and a subsequent enlightened and pragmatic decision of Parliament.

Sir Hans Sloane, born in Killyleagh, Ireland, in 1660, made his fortune as a physician and an entrepreneur. His particular youthful interest in botany and natural sciences led him to study in London, Paris and Montpellier for a degree in medicine. Travel and medicine took him yet further, to Jamaica, as physician to its governor, the duke of Albemarle, and with time on his hands he was able to study Jamaican natural history, and in particular its plant life. The fruits of Sloane’s studies included his discovery of the medicinal properties of quinine, and the improvement of a health-giving local drink made from cacao, whose recipes he collected, and in due course profited from as a patent-holder in milk chocolate. These were among the sources of Sloane’s great wealth, along with property development and letting, and the slavery-derived income from the plantations his wife had inherited in the West Indies.

This passion for collecting and organizing, and Sloane’s courageous embarkation on dangerous travel, expressed itself multifariously. One example is his two-volume account of his discoveries in and on the way to the West Indies, which he published in 1707 and 1725 as A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christophers, and Jamaica; with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, &c of the last of those Islands, to which is prefix’d, An Introduction, wherein is an Account of the Inhabitants, Air, Waters, Diseases, Trade &c of that place; with some Relations concerning the Neighbouring Continent, and Islands of America. Invocation of this book’s long and intricate title, in which already so much of the natural world’s interconnections are signalled, articulates Sloane’s life ambitions, his omnivorous interests, and his understanding of the imperative of communication. In such fertile, well-endowed ground was the seed of the British Museum nurtured. That book title alone is a grand start to the genesis of a great museum, and the demands it would make in perpetuity on its curators and trustees.

Bust of Sir Hans Sloane, 1756, by Michael Rysbrack.

Sloane’s growing collections attracted the early interest of fellow intellectuals. The diarist John Evelyn visited him in 1691 and encouraged the then thirty-one-year-old to write Voyage to the Islands:

I went to see Dr Sloan’s Curiosities, being an universal collection of the natural productions of Jamaica, consisting of Plants, fruits, Coralls, Minerals, stones, Earth, shells, animals, insects &c:, collected with greate judgement, several folios of Dried plants & one which had about 80: several sorts of Fernes, & another of Grasses; &c: the Jamaica pepper in branch, leaves, flowers, fruit &c. which with his Journal, & other Philosophical & natural discourses & observations is indeede very extraordinary and copious, sufficient to furnish an excellent History of that Iland, to which I encouraged him, & exceedingly approved his Industry.¹

Sloane’s sense of order and completeness was apparent from the start. When the German scholar and traveller Zacharias von Uffenbach visited in 1710 he was shown round the collection by Sloane, and noted that an hour of his time as a physician was worth a guinea: ‘We thought, indeed, that he did us a very great honour by sparing us the time between half past two & seven o’clock.